For the past two or three centuries gay has had sexual overtones in general. Gay meaning “merry”, “exuberantly joyful”, can be traced back to medieval French gai, but its earlier origins are unknown. Gay men were never tied up in bundles and used to burn witches can you imagine how long it would take to get such a fire going? Faggot probably comes from the word baggage, sixteenth-century slang for “harlot” as in the affectionate insult “You saucy baggage!” It is unrelated to the British public school fag system, and has no connection to faggots as bundles of sticks. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s faggot was used mainly in the black culture of Harlem. Nels Anderson in The Hobo (1923) said that “Fairies or Fags are men or boys who exploit sex for profit.” The word fairy appeared in the 1870s, and was universally understood by the 1890s. The word faggot goes back to 1914, when “faggots” and “fairies” were said to attend “drag balls”. It might go back to the 1850s phrase “all diked out” or “all decked out”, meaning faultlessly dressed in this case, like a man or “bull”. Dyke, meaning butch lesbian, goes back to 1920s black American slang: bull-diker or bull-dagger. Unfortunately we don’t know the origins of the most common queerwords that became popular during the 1930s through 1950s gay, dyke, faggot, queer, fairy. For centuries before that, comparing a woman to Sappho of Lesbos implied passions that were more than poetic.
During that century, references to “Sapphic lovers” and “Sapphist” meant a woman who liked “her own sex in a criminal way”. William King in his satire The Toast (published 1732, revised 1736), referred to “Lesbians” as women who “loved Women in the same Manner as Men love them”. Contrary to the incomplete information given in the OED, the word lesbian has meant “female homosexual” since at least the early eighteenth century. Lesbians may have a longer linguistic history than gay men.
The History of the Word 'Gay' and other Queerwords