Back in the Days When a “Gay Woman” Was a Prostitute and a “Gay Man” Was a Womanizer

How the word “gay” has evolved over the centuries

Photo by Shot by Cerqueira on Unsplash

In 1857, a satirical cartoon was published in Punch magazine. It shows two women talking at midnight; one wearing working-class or perhaps lower-middle-class women’s clothes, while her much more expensively-dressed friend stands at a…