Bent

British slang for gay, the opposite of straight: borrowed in the 1950s from bent meaning crooked or corrupt, as in a bent copper.

Bent is British slang for gay, the opposite of straight: if heterosexuals are straight, the rest of us must be crooked. It works as an adjective ("he's bent") and as a noun ("a bent"), and it sits in the same British drawer as poof, poofter and nancy.

It is less about camp mannerisms than pansy or sissy, and more about being outside the rules. That is the word's real flavor: not soft, but dodgy.

Where it comes from

Bent had a long criminal career before it came for us. In British and Australian slang it meant dishonest or corrupt by the 1910s: a bent copper takes bribes, bent goods are stolen. Calling a gay man bent borrowed all of that. In a country where sex between men was a crime until 1967, he was literally on the wrong side of the law.

Green's Dictionary of Slang finds the gay sense in Colin MacInnes's London novel Absolute Beginners in 1959 ("Not bent at all, though I had hopes that perhaps he dabbled") and in a study of gay men published the next year. The noun, a bent, follows in the same period.

Bent as a nine-bob note

The British love a simile, and bent got plenty. Green's records bent as a nine-bob note, bent as a two-bob watch, bent as a corkscrew and bent as a box of frogs, the last two meaning flamboyantly gay. A nine-bob note never existed, so it was the perfect image for something fake, crooked or, in the speaker's mind, queer.

How it is used today

In Britain bent was everyday abuse for decades, on building sites, in tabloids and in comedy. It still turns up as a sneer, and from a stranger it carries the old suggestion that being gay is something shady.

Gay men have taken it back in a quieter way than queer. The landmark is Martin Sherman's play Bent, staged at London's Royal Court in 1979 and on Broadway the same year, about gay men persecuted by the Nazis and sent to Dachau, which turned the word into a title worn with pride and grief. Among ourselves, bent is now mostly a joke: "bent as a box of frogs" is said with delight about someone who is gloriously, obviously one of us.

Related terms