454. Yesteryear's Queers' Word of the Day #51 - Friend of Dorothy
Entry posted by redheaguy51 in YESTERYEARS QUEERS WORD OF THE DAY
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"I'm just a dandy lion"
Friend of Dorothy Someone who is also gay -a member of the club- "Say the secret word" -1940s- "Those dungarees and that leather jacket really suit you, Percy, I can't help but wonder if you might also be a Friend of Dorothy." Frank L. Baum's May 17, 1900 book, the Wizard of Oz, introduced a world of weird characters, and a little girl named Dorothy who befriended a tin man, a scarecrow, and a cowardly lion. The lion became a "dandy" when Harold Arlen wrote the lyric "I'm just a dandy lion" for the 1939 film classic tune "If I only had a brain". The dandiness (a word used to describe aesthetes and somewhat effeminate men) and cowardice of the self-aware lion is such code for "queer" in the pre-Stonewall world, a world in which it was only natural for those "unnatural" men to seek each other out in not just a sexual but a social way as well. Being a friend of "Dorothy" must have taken on added meaning when, coincidentally or not, the funeral of Judy Garland and the Stonewall riot happened on the same day in the same city in the summer of 1969. Without knowing it at the time, events were setting in motion conditions for the creation of a world in which we could actually attempt to live "somewhere over the rainbow" and even create and wave a rainbow banner which said so.
"I'm just a dandy lion"
Edited by redheaguy51
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