Yeah, it's a serious thing.

I grew up in the eighties mostly (gen x), and both gay and queer were still used as insults.

But both have been reclaimed now, almost totally in the case of gay and totally in the case of queer.

My kid has in person friends here, and online friends across the world. They all use gay is a friendly and joking descriptor. It's a term of endearment even. Canadians, Germans, British, French, and (of all bloody places) South Africa for sure have kids that actively use it as a positive indicator. It's mostly a tween to teen thing though, the young adults are less prone to it.

Whats crazy to me is that kids from Texas use it that way. I mean, we live in the south, but Texas is actively anti lgbtq on an official level. But even the straight kids are using gay as a positive term for people and things.

She only has two friends from the UK on discord; one in London, one in Wales somewhere (he never has mentioned the town or city). Both of them use it that way. The guy is straight, and someone will tell him he's super gay when he does something nice, and he's just "yeah, I know".

It's a really cool thing to see happening, for me. Back in the nineties, I started being a fairly active gay rights advocate after seeing exactly how bad good people got treated for being gay. I was a bouncer for a while there, and seeing assholes try to hurt and kill patrons at the gay bars just for being gay pissed me off.

Seeing (or rather, hearing) gay not just turn into a neutral term for homosexual men, but into a slang term for something being cool makes my soul happy. Considering the original definition of the word, that means I'm gay as hell lol.