Friend of Dorothy

An old code phrase for a gay man, after Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Judy Garland, who played her: a way to ask if someone was gay without saying it.

A friend of Dorothy is a gay man. "Is he a friend of Dorothy?" was a way of asking whether someone was gay without saying the word, in a time and in places where saying it could cost you your job or worse. Anyone who got the reference was probably a friend of Dorothy too, and anyone who did not would think you were asking about a woman named Dorothy.

The Dorothy in question is the girl from Kansas in The Wizard of Oz, and above all Judy Garland, who played her in the 1939 film and became one of the great gay icons of the 20th century.

Where it comes from

Green's Dictionary of Slang ties the phrase to Dorothy and Garland, and records variants like friend of Dorothy's and friend of Dot's. Bruce Rodgers' 1972 dictionary of gay slang already has "Dorothy and Toto" as camp shorthand for a gay man and his dog, or for a male couple. The phrase itself turns up in print in a 1986 personal ad in the Sydney Morning Herald, where a "quiet friend of Dorothys" was looking for someone to share a large home, and in 1988 the London paper Capital Gay joked about a "Somewhere-Over-The-Rainbow Coalition" offering little to "the friends of Dorothy". It was surely spoken long before it was printed, but nobody knows exactly when it started.

Why Dorothy? The film is full of things gay men recognized: a girl who leaves a gray, small-town world for a dazzling one in color, collects a band of misfits, and finds out she had the power to be herself all along. Add Garland's own life, with its glamour, its breakdowns and its survival, and it is easy to see why so many of us felt she was singing to us. The rainbow did the rest.

Relatives

Friend of Dorothy belongs to a family of polite code words for gay men. "So" and "musical" were two more, and a 1991 book strings them together: "We didn't know that you were so. We didn't know that you were musical. We didn't know that you were a friend of Dorothy". Britain went further and had a whole secret language, Polari. Others were less polite, like light in the loafers.

How it is used today

Few people need a code to ask if someone is gay anymore, so the phrase has become affectionate and a bit retro. You hear it with a wink, in the names of gay bars and clubs, and from older men who used it when it really mattered. Saying it today is a small tribute to camp, to Judy, and to the men who found each other with a sentence that sounded completely innocent.

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