Queen

A gay man, especially an effeminate, flamboyant or dramatic one; an old insult that gay men took back and now use with love.

A queen is a gay man, usually an effeminate, flamboyant or theatrical one: the man who walks into a room as if it owes him an entrance. Among ourselves it is one of the oldest and most flexible words we have. It can be an insult, a term of endearment, a job description, a diagnosis and a compliment, sometimes in the same sentence.

"She's such a queen" can mean he is dramatic, he is fabulous, he is camp, or just that he is gay and everybody knows it. Tone does all the work. And the word has a huge family of compounds, from drag queen to size queen, that turn it into a way of saying what a man is obsessed with.

Where it comes from

Queen grew out of quean, a 16th-century English word for a woman, and some writers still spell the gay sense quean or quine to keep the two apart. Applied to effeminate men it is very old: Green's Dictionary of Slang's earliest example of the gay sense is a broadside of 1699. In the 20th century it was everywhere in gay speech. American prison slang recorded "queen. An effeminate man" in 1932, and John Rechy was writing about "muscle queens" in 1967.

For most of that history it was also an insult. Straight men used it to mock, and plenty of gay men used it against each other: the "real men" sneering at the queens, the queens sneering back. The queens, for their part, were often the ones on the front line. They could not pass, so they did not try, and that took a kind of courage the men who could hide never needed.

The queen family

Add a word in front and queen becomes a label for what you love:

• Drag queen: a performer of exaggerated femininity, the most famous queen of all; see drag.
• Size queen: a man who wants them big; see size queen.
• Gym queen, muscle queen: lives for the gym and the mirror, close to the gym bunny.
• Drama queen: now used by everybody, but very much ours.
• Queen mother: an older gay man who takes younger ones under his wing; Green's has it in gay speech from 1976.

How it is used today

Queen has been almost fully reclaimed. Gay men call each other queen, girl, she and her with no malice at all, and the drag world has made "yas queen" a global catchphrase. Calling yourself a queen is a way of saying you will not apologize for being visibly gay.

It still stings in the wrong mouth. A straight man calling someone a queen is rarely being affectionate, and among gay men "no queens" in an app profile is just "no fems" in older clothes. The opposite pole is butch; in between sits a whole spectrum, with nelly at the queeny end.

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