Queen (slang)

In gay slang, queen is a term used to refer to flamboyant or effeminate gay man. The term can either be pejorative or celebrated as a type of self-identification.

"Fruit salad" refers to gay men who don't have a racial preference in their romantic partners.

Drag queen

Drag artist Lypsinka.

A drag queen is a person, usually a man, who dresses, and usually acts, like a woman often for the purpose of entertaining or performing. There are many kinds of drag artists and they vary greatly from professionals who have starred in movies to people who just try it a few times. Drag queens also vary by class and culture and can vary even within the same city. Although many drag queens are presumed to be gay men or transgender people, there are drag artists of all genders and sexualities who do drag for many reasons.

Generally, drag queens dress in a female role, often exaggerating certain characteristics for comic, dramatic or satirical effect. Other drag performers include drag kings, who are women who perform in male roles, faux queens, who are women who dress in an exaggerated style to emulate drag queens and faux kings, who are men who dress to impersonate drag kings.

The term drag queen usually refers to people who dress in drag for the purpose of performing, whether singing or lip-synching, dancing, participating in events such as gay pride parades, drag pageants, or at venues such as cabarets and discotheques. In the United Kingdom, alongside traditional drag work such as shows and performances, many drag queens engage in 'mix-and-mingle' or hosting work at night clubs or at private parties/events. Drag is a part of Western gay culture; it is often noted that the Stonewall riots on June 27, 1969 in New York City were inspired and led by drag queens and, in part for this reason, drag queens remain a tradition at pride events. Prominent drag queens in the gay community of a city often serve as official or unofficial spokesmen, hosts or M.C.s, fund-raisers, chroniclers and community leaders.

Rice queen

A rice queen is a gay male who prefers or exclusively dates East Asian men.[1] The term is considered gay slang and depending on the context, may be considered derogatory and offensive internationally.[2]

Sticky rice refers to East Asian males who prefer other East Asian males.[3][4]

Burnt rice refers to East Asian males who prefer black males.

The term rice king is used to describe heterosexual males who seek East Asian women.

Yellow fever denotes the attraction certain non-East Asian people may have for East Asian men or women.

Bean queen

Bean queen or rice and bean queen are terms used in the Anglophonic gay community to refer to a male who is primarily attracted to Hispanic and Latino males. One source describes these as "Gay men who are attracted to gentlemen of the Latino flava."[5][6][7]

The term is probably derived from the better-established term "rice queen", substituting the rice that forms the basis of many East Asian diets with the beans or rice and beans popular throughout Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Other food-based variations such as taco queen, salsa queen and so on are heard occasionally.[6][8]

Refried beans refers to Hispanic and Latin men who prefer other Hispanic and Latin men.

Much less frequently, these terms are used to describe gay Latin males themselves.[8]

Hummus queen

A hummus queen is a male who prefers or Middle Eastern men. Hummus is a traditional Middle Eastern chickpea-based dip.

Dairy/Potato/Snow queen

A dairy queen, potato queen or snow queen is a man who prefers white men. Often, but not always, it is a younger East Asian man who dates older white men.[9] The name could be considered gay slang. Depending on the context, the term may be considered derogatory and offensive internationally.[2]

Mitten queen

One who prefers to masturbate partners[10]

Fire Queen

One who likes to burn partners with cigarettes &c and/or vice versa[11]

Matzah queen

A matzah queen is a male who prefers or exclusively dates Jewish men. Matzah is an unleavened bread traditionally eaten by Jews during Passover.

Chocolate queen

A chocolate queen is a male who prefers black men.[4] Other terms are coal queen and dinge queen, which are considered derogatory.

Size queen

A size queen is a male who prefers men who have large penises or large build.[12]

Opera queen

Opera queen is a gay slang term for gay men who love opera. The term inspired the title of the book The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum, and opera queens are, more generally, the subject of Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt.

Gym queen

Gym queen refers to men who are into body-building and working out either to bulk up and may include steroid use or those looking for a more lithe physique.[4] Although body building and male physique magazines were popular before the 1970s, the Castro clone look workboots, jeans, tight white T-shirt, shorter well-kept hair, and a well-muscled physique became widely known and emulated in the 1970s and 1980s replacing the hippie artistic constructs and fashions.[13]

Chicken queen

A chicken queen is a male who prefers men younger than he is.

Spice/curry queen

A spice queen or curry queen is a man who prefers Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi men. Spice refers to the primary ingredient in Indian cuisine.

Queen bee

Queen bee is a gay slang term for the dominant member of a group of gay men. It is normally synonymous with the word "bitch". It is unclear whether the term is taken from the term applied to the leader of a female social group or literally from the insect world.

Mashed potato

A mashed potato is a white male who prefers other white males.

In literature

An early example of this usage in mainstream literature occurs in the 1933 novel The Young and the Evil by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler: "While waiting Karel wet his hair and put his handkerchief smeared with mascara behind a pipe. You still look like a queen Frederick said..."[14]

Actually, the first known use of "queen" to describe gays derisively was noted by Dante (Purgatoria 26:78), in the early fourteenth century.[15]

In music

The Pink Floyd song from 1979 album The Wall, "Waiting for the Worms", contains the line "Waiting, for the queens and the coons and the reds and the Jews". The Kinks song from 1970, "Top of the Pops", contains the line "I've been invited to a dinner with a prominent queen..." and may be one of the earliest recorded examples of this usage. Their 1966 song "Little Miss Queen of Darkness" may be an even earlier reference, though more ambiguous in its possible description of a drag queen "accidentally met" in a discotheque, whose "false eyelashes/ were not much of a disguise..." and who was "not all that it might seem..."[16]

The name of famous British rock group, Queen, can be seen as a reference to gay slang. According to singer Freddie Mercury, he "was certainly aware of the gay connotations" when suggesting the name, although, as he admitted,"that was just one facet of it".[17]

See also

References

  1. The Rice Queen Diaries, author Daniel Gawthrop (2005, Arsenal Pulp Press) — ISBN 9781551521893
  2. 1 2 Ayres T (1999). China doll - the experience of being a gay Chinese Australian. Journal of Homosexuality, 36(3-4): 87-97
  3. Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video Glen M. Mimura, pg 141, U of Minnesota Press, 2009; ISBN 978-0-8166-4831-3, 9780816648313.
  4. 1 2 3 Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape Peter Manso, pg 55; Simon and Schuster, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7432-4311-7, ISBN 978-0-7432-4311-7.
  5. Lambda online "rules of attraction" Archived March 9, 2012, at the Wayback Machine.
  6. 1 2 Misadventures in Boyland Archived October 16, 2006, at the Wayback Machine.
  7. Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang by Paul Baker
  8. 1 2 Dictionary of Sexual Terms
  9. Potato Queen A Novel by Rafaelito V. Sy (Palari Publishing 2005) ISBN 1-928662-06-4
  10. Dictionary of Slang & Euphemism (Spears 1987)
  11. Dictionary of Slang & Euphemism (Spears 1987)
  12. "Size Queen". Archived from the original on 2014-04-12.
  13. The Castro: San Francisco neighborhoods PBS documentary.
  14. Girodias, Maurice, The Olympia Reader, New York: Grove Press, 1965, excerpt from The Young and The Evil, Ford and Tyler p.208.
  15. http://www.italianstudies.org/comedy/Purgatorio26.htm - verse 78.
  16. "Kinks Song List". Archived from the original on 2013-12-07.
  17. http://www.queenzone.com/biography/queen-biography-for-1970.aspx. Missing or empty |title= (help)
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