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I saw this phrase in John Gray's The New Leviathans. Can someone tell me the meaning of it?

Why Bukharin confessed to the crimes of which he was accused is central to his significance today. Koestler had Bukharin’s alter-ego Rubashov accepting the accusations against him as a final act of loyalty to the party. Some of Koestler’s contemporaries regarded this as nonsense. The Polish-Jewish poet, sometime communist and later convert to Catholicism Aleksander Wat, who had been arrested, interrogated and interned in Soviet prisons, wrote that for most of those who admitted to crimes they had never committed, the mild methods of interrogation described in Darkness at Noon ‘would have been the subject of gay mockery’. Wat took his own life in Paris in 1967.

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Before “gay” referred to sexual preferences, it simply meant, according to AHD happily excited, cheerful, or merry.

See https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=gay.

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  • I didn't understand it in context.
    – user612467
    Commented Dec 3 at 8:55
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    People who had really been interrogated by the Soviets would have laughed at the comparatively mild methods described in the novel, because the reality was much worse.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Dec 3 at 9:13
  • Thank you very much.
    – user612467
    Commented Dec 3 at 9:20