SOME MONTHS AGO, an older gentleman at the center of a wide circle of friends his own age and younger died. A week after the funeral a text arrives from a fellow mourner: “I miss that queen.” So do I. But it occurred to me that had that message shown up on someone else’s phone, the digital equivalent of a wrong number, it would almost certainly have mystified the receiver. Queen? What’s a queen?
“Queen” was once a term not fully understood—and certainly not used—outside the subculture in which it originated: gay bars and other meeting places. Gay men have always owned it. But today its use is creeping into mainstream vernacular via the corrupting touch of—what else?—merchandise and marketing.
A friend sends a text saying simply “nap queen.” I text back that it’s not yet noon, and that he’s showing his age, at which point a photo of a pillow positioned in a window display at Marshalls pops onto the screen. “Nap Queen,” reads the pillow. A crown hovering over the words is part of the logo. An on-line search reveals that Nap Queen is a brand. You can get Nap Queen mugs, T-shirts, sweatshirts, dorm decor, and hoodies. Buy one and proclaim your need to prioritize rest.
There is even a San Francisco-based business called Bitter Queens that “started as a spirited hobby amongst a duo of cocktail enthusiasts” and now retails, via mail order, “unique bitters flavors of superb quality destined for cocktail dens.” Please allow one to two weeks for delivery.
Marketing seizes words to sell things. It can turn transgression into toothpaste, attitude into cocktails. Is it possible to believe the geniuses appropriating “nap queen” haven’t the slightest idea what’s implied, namely a geriatric homosexual?
Elsewhere in the culture, you wonder if this infinitely elastic word, “queen”—a pejorative or a term of endearment, take your pick—is going the way of so many gay bars worldwide.
Let’s hope not. But you have to wonder: as gay bars close, will the lexicon they spawned similarly vanish, its picked-over pieces monetized by marketers? Will “queen” end up consigned to the same linguistic graveyard in which “Mary” now lies buried? Anyone under forty or fifty would be mystified to be called “Mary,” but it was once the all-purpose form of address in the gay world. “Mary” reminded you of your place. You didn’t need to be in a dress to be addressed that way. You didn’t even need to be out, but you could be outed by the term, like a friend of mine who had never discussed the issue of his sexuality with his ex-Marine father. One morning at breakfast, he asked his dad whether there was any milk left. “It’s in the refrigerator, Mary,” his father replied.
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“What makes a king a king?” This is the musical question that’s posed by Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. It is a question that he poses with great urgency. In a similar vein, we may pose the corresponding question: what makes a queen a queen?
Wikipedia defines a “Queen (slang)” as “a flamboyant or effeminate gay man.” Well, that’s one version, though it omits the element of self-mockery, the acknowledgment of marginalization implicit in the term. In one definition, every gay man is a queen, even if not yet actualized. But queen also offers verbal refuge from oppression. It’s a subculture’s safe house. And it contains a certain regal component that’s essential, an element of calculation without which no truly great queen—Elizabeth I of England or Catherine the Great of Russia, say—ever got anywhere. Queens must survive in a world where masculinity is power, and to do that you need craft and cunning. These are as essential to being a queen as they are to winning at chess.
I cite as evidence the first actual queen I ever knew, apart from myself. The time was the early 1970s, the place, the East Halls dormitories at Penn State, whose residents were freshmen, 99 percent of them white. Casual conversation centered on frats, food, football, parties, and pussy. In this pale adolescent world of hash pipes and thumb-smudged King Crimson albums, Darren Fairy was the standout. Of milk-chocolate complexion, androgynous, even femme, in appearance, with a name gayer than he was, if that’s possible. (I have replaced the original with its aural equivalent.) In dorm rooms and dining halls, he drew quizzical looks and testosterone-fueled scowls.
Why Darren Fairy wasn’t at some point set upon by football’s finest, or at least subjected to the virulent harassment that precedes violence—neither unknown in that place at that time—became evident within about a month of his moving in. He had a posse or, more aptly, a suite (definition #4: “a group of people in attendance on a monarch or other person of high rank”), as any royal queen must. Fairy’s consisted of a dozen or so white guys, demonstrably working-class, who, it turned out, all lived on his dorm floor. In the mornings this jocular troupe headed off to First Period together. In the evenings Fairy and his retinue similarly arrived en masse at the dining hall, advancing toward the chow line while scouts were dispatched to claim a table as the rest were filling their trays.
No sooner were they seated than you heard the voice. It was unmistakably fey, and contained within it the equally unmistakable self-confidence of someone who knew his part well. This voice stabbed at the air and came down like a snapping blade, and the sound it made—only a few of his words, at most, discernible—was almost immediately muffled in titters, guffaws, and sometimes by great peals of laugher. Another remark, more mirth. And so it went while the rest of the crowded room looked on, not quite knowing what to think. Clearly entertainment of the highest order was on offer at that table to which only these folks—Fairy’s consorts and protectors—had exclusive access.
Years later, I read John Malcolm Brinnin’s 1986 memoir about Truman Capote at Yaddo, where a similar performance is recorded to have taken place in that venerable institution’s dining room, as various guests competed to sit at Truman’s table, the rest glowering with resentment. This is queen territory, ladies and gentlemen, as distinct from merely “queer,” which is only one of its many components. The others? Well, we’ve already named a few. But add to these wit, eccentricity, and a thoroughly obsessive nature. Any real queen possesses all these and more in some measure. The “flamboyance” and “effeminacy” in Wikipedia’s sterile definition are hats so old they belong in a box.
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I have always thought the idea of Queer Studies earnest to the point of tedium. Why not Queen Studies? A PhD in it might include seminars on how to properly mix a Harvey Wallbanger (or bitters), lectures on orchid raising, and (for gin and Judy queens) dissertations on that marvelous five-minute-or-so take in A Star is Born when Judy Garland responds to a question from the dubiously sober James Mason—along the lines of “What did you do at the studio today?”—by singing and dancing her answer (a star turn that eliminates any question, ever, about the scope of her talent as artist and entertainer).
“Queen” can evoke whole ontologies. It’s specific, but almost infinitely malleable. Attach it to a trait, to sexual behaviors, to objects or fetishes, and watch it morph into a category, even if just for the moment, a category of one. If there’s one, there are, implicitly, more. You just have yet to meet them.
I’m thinking of the Christmas queen in my building, whose studio apartment contains 284 Santas in addition to three artificial trees lighted and fully decorated year-round; or the salt-and-pepper queen that I was introduced to many years ago, whose living room furniture had been evicted to make way for three glass display cases large enough to cage a kangaroo and filled with condiment dispensers; or the clutch of doll queens I once met at an otherwise innocent-seeming party. One bragged of owning 332 Raggedy Anns, while another regaled us with tales of his exploits at Kewpiesta in Branson, Missouri, a gathering of similar collectors to swap and sell Kewpie dolls. (This year’s theme? “Further along the Kewpie Trail.”) When I left, they were jousting over the merits of their respective collections. It was getting acidulous.
So, a simple equation: Gay man + his obsession = queen. It’s a way of calling attention to the fact of eccentricity as a commonplace. Queen can denote a mindset (control queen), a sexual predilection (chicken queen, leather queen, scat queen), a passion (disco queen, opera queen), an occupation (petal queen = florist), or a hobby (china queen). For decades it included all those in-group racial epithets—dinge queen, rice queen, curry queen—leveled at white men who dared to date outside their race. However, in our time the casual use of some of those terms would drop the temperature of a conversation about 300 degrees Fahrenheit. You would suddenly find yourself moored on one of Jupiter’s moons.
But queen as a style endures. Take sweater queens. Department stores were once riddled with them, gliding up and down escalators on Sunday afternoons, fanning away vodka hangovers. “What’s a sweater queen?” a woman at the office once asked, completely bewildered while I was narrating the tale of my previous Saturday evening at the bar. I tried to conjure for her the image of four or five thirty-something men with loose cashmere limbs draped and knotted—bunched almost—directly above the solar plexus. She shook her head, still not quite getting it.
Size queen? That one she got, no problem.
And then there’s the dish queen. To dish is not just to pass along gossip but to do so in a purposefully destructive way. That deadly verb goes back to at least the 1920s, if not before. Lorenz Hart of Rodgers and Hart fame—who was a major queen—used it in a line in one of his best songs. (“Won’t dish the dirt with the rest of the girls/ That’s why the lady is a tramp.”) Not coincidentally, the noun “queen” can also be traced back to that decade.
The dish queens will always be with us, as Jesus said in the Gospels. My best guess is that dish queens really always have been with us. “Trippers and askers surround me,” Walt Whitman reported in Song of Myself, and it isn’t hard to imagine a passel of dish queens in some corner of Pfaff’s, on Broadway, hissing away (“Leaves of grass! Who does she think she is?”) while the bard sits, sipping sherry and trying to catch the barkeep’s eye. Dish is rage, power, or recognition denied. Dish queens don’t go for nobodies if there’s a somebody in the room. Truman Capote made a career of it. Dish queens are the pollinators of invidious information. Any Queen Studies textbook worth its salt would have a whole chapter just on that subject.
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Once, it seemed, there was an inexhaustible supply of queens and types of queens to help give life the spice it needs, and these included the only two that seem to have crossed cultural bounds to become concepts the broad American public is familiar with. One is the drag queen, lovingly sent up in a John Wallowitch song titled “Bruce” that was a set piece for the late cabaret performer and somewhat mercurial personality Blossom Dearie: “Bruce, you’ve got to reduce./ Spruce up that caboose, Bruce,/ Or wear something loose, Bruce,/ You’re lacking allure.” A drag queen who’s not a queen is a mere transvestite.
The other is the drama queen. A signature type: the gay man who’s not just prone to hysteria but requires it to the point that he can be counted on to manufacture a full-on crisis where none exists. We’ve all had friends like these. For a while. The term captures the sense of an overriding instability.
Meanwhile, “drama queen” has been transformed via vernacular American speech into a term that refers to anyone inclined to view things in an overly emotional way. It’s gone generic. Women dismiss other women as drama queens. I’ve even heard straight guys refer to another straight guy as a drama queen, and I’ve seen it used this way in The New York Times.
When I hear straight people using this expression, I think: don’t they get it? You need to be a queen—a gay man—to be a drama queen. Otherwise, it’s word candy, like calling something “awesome.” Inclusion is the permission that gives you the right to use it. Whoever has that permission can, with a modicum of invention, apply “queen” effectively and endlessly. It compresses a cloud of knowledge into the raindrop of an image, like the briefest poems are required to do. Speaking of which, I asked a certain poet once about a party he’d been to some time the previous week. He shook his head and sighed. “Real estate queens,” he said. We moved on.
Jim Cory is a poet who lives in Philadelphia.
