it happened again

Mermaid friend was making a comparison between me and someone else, and so she gestured to them and said “small gay” and then gestured to me and said “small…” and then just trailed off.  So I asked something like, “What?  You couldn’t decide on a noun?  Ace can be a noun,” and she said, “No, I just don’t know how you feel about being referred to as a gay.”

…I don’t know how to explain to her that “how I feel about it” is mainly this strong sense of you’ll get in trouble.

What I actually said, for the record, was something along the lines of “the real gay people wouldn’t like that.”