Fierce

Bold, striking and gorgeous with a hint of danger: drag and gay slang praise for a look or an attitude that takes over the room.

Fierce, in gay mouths, means bold, striking, gorgeous in a way that could hurt you. A fierce look is not pretty: it is armed. A fierce queen walks into the room like she owns the building, and a fierce pair of boots is the kind other people step aside for. The word keeps a little of its original danger, which is exactly why we like it.

It is praise for presence and attitude more than beauty. A man can be cute without being fierce, and fierce without being conventionally handsome. What matters is that he means it.

Where it comes from

Using fierce to mean excellent is older than most people think. An Australian paper listed it as "a new synonym for smart" in 1900, and an American in 1912 bragged that he used to be "a fierce dresser". Green's Dictionary of Slang files it with the bad-means-good words, like wicked and sick.

The gay sense took that old approval and sharpened it in the drag and ballroom scene, where fierce sat next to slay and serve in the vocabulary of the runway. Bob the Drag Queen once explained how drag bends it: in real life you would say an outfit is very fierce; in drag you just say "fierce boots". Nobody has found a first written example of the drag use, so we will not invent one.

The Siriano years

In the late 2000s the word met prime time. Christian Siriano, who won the fourth season of Project Runway at 22, made fierce his catchphrase and practically his brand. America picked it up, overused it and got tired of it in record time. For a while fierce sounded like reality TV rather than like a queen at a ball.

How it is used today

Fierce has survived its moment of overexposure and settled back into the family of cheers: werk, yas, slay. It is a little more old-school than slay, which gives it a certain charm when a queen of a certain age says it. Among younger gay men it often gets an ironic twist, but the compliment still lands.

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