Mother

The queen who guides and protects the younger ones: the head of a ballroom house, a drag mother, and now online the highest praise for an icon.

In gay slang, mother is the queen who takes care of the younger ones: the head of a house in ballroom, the drag mother who teaches a new queen to paint her face, the older friend who shows a newcomer how gay life works. Lately it has a second life online as the highest compliment there is: if someone is mother, she is iconic, the one everyone else learned from.

A mother does not have to be a woman, or old, or even particularly maternal. What makes her mother is authority and care, in roughly equal parts, and a willingness to read you to filth when you deserve it.

Where it comes from

Gay men have called each other mother for a long time. Green's Dictionary of Slang quotes a Harlem newspaper of 1941 describing men who "switch when they walk and call each other 'mother'", and a 1965 glossary of gay terms that defines mother as "the older male homosexual, most always effeminate, who assumes a protective or guiding role", adding that it is "somewhat more 'friendly' than auntie". In this older sense, the mother was the man who brought you out into the gay world and showed you the ropes.

In ballroom

Ballroom made the title official. Every house is led by a mother, and often a father, and its members are her children. The mother picks the children, trains them for the balls, settles their fights and, for children whose own families had turned them away, becomes the family they did not have. The house mothers of New York, from Crystal LaBeija on, are some of the most respected figures in queer history.

How it is used today

• Drag mother: the queen who brought you into drag and often gave you your drag name.
• House mother: the head of a ballroom house.
• "She's mother", "mother is mothering": on social media, praise for a woman or a queen who is iconic and sets the standard.
• Mother, as a nickname: what you call the friend who always has painkillers, a phone charger and an opinion.

The online "mother" has spread far beyond gay circles, often to praise female pop stars, which brings it full circle: gay men have always crowned their divas. Close relatives are queen, fierce and slay.

Related terms