Fruit

Old American slang for a gay man, used as an insult since the early 20th century, from fruit as something soft and easy; now often used playfully among ourselves.

Fruit is old American slang for a gay man, said with a sneer. It was a word for the street, the barracks and the comedy club, short, dismissive and easy to spit out: "he's a fruit". It stands next to fairy and pansy in the 20th-century catalog of insults, but with less femininity built in and more plain contempt.

Today it sounds a bit vintage, which is why a lot of us now say it with a grin, and why it still stings when it comes from someone who means it.

Where it comes from

Green's Dictionary of Slang starts with an earlier meaning: in 1890s American college slang a fruit was an easy mark, a dupe, a soft target, from the image of ripe fruit that is "soft" and "easy picking". In 1900 a list of college words already defined fruit as an immoral man, and by 1927 a psychiatry manual listed fruit and fairy as words for a homosexual man. From there it became one of the commonest American insults for us through the middle of the century.

Nobody can prove which way the image ran, from soft and easy to effeminate, or from "immoral" to gay. The overlap of meanings in those early lists suggests it was a bit of both.

The fruit machine

The word left a darker mark in Canada. During the Cold War, government purges targeted gay and lesbian civil servants, and a device built at Carleton University to "detect" homosexuality by measuring arousal was nicknamed the fruit machine. It failed and was never widely used, but the name came to stand for the whole era of repression, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau referred to it in the national apology of 2017.

How it is used today

Fruit was never reclaimed with a manifesto, the way queer was. It came back sideways, through camp: gay men call each other fruits, and a group of friends might be a fruit basket or a fruit salad. Jokes about "not being straight, like a banana" belong to the same playful turn. Paul Baker's Polari glossary in Fabulosa! still lists fruit simply as "a gay man".

From an outsider it still lands as an insult, especially with older men who remember it as the word that came before a fist. In Britain, where poof and bent did the same job, fruit always sounded slightly American.

Related terms