Life on the Spot! Life and Leisure in Doha, Qatar

It’s been a long time since my last post under this title.  It’s not that my daughter has been any less talkative lately.  It is actually the opposite, she’s says a lot of things and sometimes it’s hard to keep track of them. But lately she’s been curious about the word “gay”.  She’s been hearing it on TV, one time she just asked “Mom what does gay mean?”  It would have been easier to explain if it were the “gay” that meant happy, bright, cheery, or merry.  But it is actually the the “gay” which in contemporary usage is 1.)noun- a homosexual, homo, someone who practices homosexuality; having a sexual attraction to persons of the same sex; 2.)adjective- usually describes a person's sexual orientation, being the standard term for homosexual. 

How do we explain this to a 4-year old girl who knows of a girl and boy as the two sexes (well biologically)?  So we decided to tell her the former definition than the latter for now.  We know in time she will have an understanding of its other meaning. 

Just this morning, she heard the word gay again and this is what she had to say: “Happy is gay!”