Beard

A woman who poses as the girlfriend or wife of a gay man so that people think he is straight; more loosely, anyone who acts as a cover.

A beard is a woman who poses as the girlfriend or wife of a gay man, so that the world thinks he is straight. She comes to the office party on his arm, smiles in the photos, and goes home to her own bed. Sometimes she knows exactly what her job is, sometimes she does not, and that is a much sadder story.

It has nothing to do with facial hair, although the joke is too easy to resist: a gay man with a full beard and a beard is doubly covered. The word works the other way round too: a gay man can be a beard for a lesbian, and two of them can beard for each other.

Where it comes from

In American slang a beard is a front or a cover in more than one world: gamblers used men called beards to place their bets, and a beard could be a friend who covered for you during an affair. On that last sense, a 1972 book about Washington recalled that "bearding" for a married congressman who wanted to go out with a lady other than his wife was a duty of the bachelor staff. Gay slang had the word by the mid-1960s. Bruce Rodgers' 1972 dictionary of gay slang, which dates the word to the mid-1960s, gives both senses: a woman who dates gay men to help them socially, and, as a verb, to date a woman to avoid suspicion.

Hollywood and the lavender marriage

The beard is a classic of old Hollywood, where studio contracts and gossip columns made it dangerous for a leading man to be anything but straight. Arranged dates for the cameras and marriages of convenience, called lavender marriages, kept careers alive and the closet door shut. Gore Vidal gave the word a famous outing in his 1983 novel Duluth, with a joke about J. Edgar Hoover using a beard.

How it is used today

The word is still everywhere, in gossip about celebrities whose girlfriends appear on the red carpet and nowhere else, and in our own lives, about the cousin who brought "a friend" to Christmas for ten years running. It has spread beyond gay life to any front: a business partner who is really a frontman, a date brought along to hide an affair, an alibi in human form.

Among us it is a word with some sympathy in it. Most of us know a man who once needed a beard, and many of us know a woman who agreed to be one, out of love, friendship or a bit of both. Her cousin is the fag hag, who is in on the joke from the start.

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