Swish

The effeminate sway of a gay man's walk and gestures, and a man who moves that way; American slang since the late 1930s, from the swishing sound of a skirt.

Swish is the effeminate sway of a gay man: the hips that move a little too much, the wrist that flicks, the walk that sounds like silk. A swish, as a noun, is a man who walks and talks like that, and swishy is the adjective for anything with a touch of it.

It is a word about movement and style, not about sex. Like flamer and nelly, it describes how visible someone is, and like them it has been used both to mock us and, later, to celebrate the ones who never toned it down.

Where it comes from

The word imitates a sound: the swish of a skirt, a cane, a curtain. Green's Dictionary of Slang links the gay sense to the verb swish, to move with that kind of rustling flourish. Its first example of swish as a noun for a gay man comes from the gossip columnist Walter Winchell in 1939: "Everyone knew Oscar [Wilde] was a swish!". Two years later Gershon Legman's glossary of homosexual language explained that even objects could be called swish if they had that quality.

By the 1950s the word could carry a whole joke on its own: a 1952 exposé claimed Harvard was "so gay you can hear the swish across the River Charles".

Swish queens and butch

In the mid-20th century gay world, swish was half of a famous pair. A 1964 report on homosexuality in Florida described the two types most familiar to the public as the "Swish Queen" and the "Butch". The queen swished; the butch man did not. That split still haunts the apps today, in the endless debate over masc and femme.

How it is used today

Swish is mostly American and a little old-fashioned, which has softened it. Gay men use it fondly, about a friend's runway walk or their own after two cocktails. From an outsider it can still sound like a sneer, the same sneer behind limp-wristed.

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