From Chris Ambidge a few days ago, this reproduction of a Jell-O ad from roughly 50 years ago (now in a color version unearthed by Chris Hansen). Go gay with Jell-O today!
This was from a time before the ‘homosexual’ sense of gay spread into general use, when the relevant sense (from OED3, August 2010) was:
Of persons, their attributes, actions, etc.: light-hearted, carefree; manifesting, characterized by, or disposed to joy and mirth; exuberantly cheerful, merry; sportive.
Now of course we’re inclined to see double entendres in material like this, and people complain that homosexuals have “stolen” the word gay — though in fact all they/we did was introduce another sense of the word (well, really, another word), usually easily distinguishable in context from the one above. Then the usage above was contaminated for people who were offended by the mention of homosexuality.
Here’s another gay Jell-O ad, from the 3/5/45 issue of Life magazine:
March 22, 2011 at 9:27 am |
[…] Then just yesterday, posting on Jell-O ads (here), I repeatedly typed JELLO-O instead of JELL-O — including in the title of the posting, which […]
March 23, 2011 at 6:02 am |
For Jell-O enthusiasts, there’s a museum in LeRoy NY, birthplace of Jell-O. (Link from Emily Rizzo on Facebook.)
March 23, 2011 at 6:04 am |
Several Facebook posters have noted a connection between gay men and a childhood fondness for making Jell-O concoctions. So there’s a sense in which Jell-O is a gay dessert.
March 23, 2011 at 6:45 am |
Illegible in my black-and-white rendering of the ad, but the coloured version has legible mouseprint at the bottom “Jell-O is a registered trademark in Canada owned by General Foods Ltd” — so that’s a *Canadian* gay Jell-O ad!
March 25, 2011 at 8:40 am |
[…] More from Chris Ambidge, following up on Jell-O the gay dessert: […]
March 26, 2011 at 3:52 pm |
[…] cock horse to Banbury Cross”. So this is solidly from the pre-gay-consciousness era, like the gay Jell-O and the gay Jester Wools. A […]
August 5, 2012 at 3:12 pm |
[…] “Jell-O is the gay dessert”, here) — and long before homosexuality could be mentioned or depicted in mainstream comics (though […]