Kiki

A get-together of friends for gossip, laughs and drinks; to kiki is to chat and cackle. In older gay slang, kiki meant a versatile or bisexual man.

A kiki is a get-together of friends for gossip, laughs and a bit of fun, usually with drinks and usually at someone's place. To kiki, or to have a kiki, is to sit around and chat, cackle, spill tea and maybe throw a little shade. It is the opposite of a big night out: no door policy, no dress code, just your people.

The word also describes the mood: a kiki is a good, silly, carefree time, and if something was "such a kiki", you had a blast.

Where it comes from

The party sense is recent and comes from Black American and gay slang. Green's Dictionary of Slang defines kiki as "a party" and quotes a 2022 novel whose narrator remembers nights at the Sound Factory and "havin a kiki on the piers" in New York. The Scissor Sisters' camp hit "Let's Have a Kiki" then carried the word into clubs everywhere.

The word itself is much older in gay slang, but with a completely different meaning. From the 1930s kiki described a gay man who was happy as either the active or the passive partner, what we would now call vers; by 1970 a linguist noted that on the East Coast it meant exactly that, while on the West Coast it meant bisexual. Gershon Legman recorded "ki-ki queens" in 1941, adding that they were held in mild contempt by the "pay-off queens", and vice versa. Whether the party kiki grew out of that old word or was coined fresh, nobody knows for sure.

The kiki scene

In ballroom, "kiki" also names a looser, more playful scene next to the main competitive one, with its own kiki houses and kiki balls, where the stakes are lower and the fun comes first; Te Papa's history of ballroom mentions kiki houses and balls as far away as New Zealand.

How it is used today

• Have a kiki: get together and gossip.
• Kiki-ing: chatting and laughing. "We were kiki-ing all night."
• Kiki house, kiki ball: the ballroom version.

Kiki sits in the same family as tea, reading and werk, and like them it has escaped to the wider world. But it still sounds best in a queen's mouth, preferably at midnight with a glass in hand.

Related terms