Gay — unisex name

What the Data Says About Gay

The Social Security Administration has registered 17,985 babies named Gay between 1886 and 1982, spanning 97 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Gay currently falls outside the top 1,000 girls' names for 1982. The name reached its historical peak in 1959, when 682 babies received it in a single year. Gay is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 1,382 additional births since 1883.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Gay performed strongest in the 1950s, accumulating 5,654 births during that ten-year window. Across the 11 decades of recorded activity, Gay shows a clear decline from its mid-century high. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in Texas, which accounts for 2,006 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by California and New York. In total, SSA state-level files list Gay in 46 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Gay in our reference dataset. These figures derive from SSA's annual national and state-level name files, which include any name appearing at least five times in a given year or state-year; names below that threshold are suppressed for privacy and therefore excluded from the totals shown here. The 17,985 total represents a lower bound — actual usage may be higher in years or states where the count fell below the disclosure floor. This page is provided for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute personal, legal, or naming advice.