The Gay Community: Who thought there was a real life Dorothy that all gay men were friends with?
Not only is The Wizard of Oz an adaptation of a novel, but it also has a truly bananas amount of sequels that go into some strange directions.
In the fifth book in the series, Dorothy Gale meets a character called Polychrome, a cloud fairy who becomes one of the more important characters in the whole set of novels.
In their first meeting, Polychrome takes one look at the protagonist’s travelling companions and says, “You have some queer friends, Dorothy.” Dorothy replies, “The queerness doesn’t matter, so long as they’re your friends.”
Now, is this the origin of the term ‘Friend of Dorothy’? It’s possible, but it’s linked to just one line of dialogue. After all, the queerness of the Oz books speak for themselves despite being written before World War I. However, let’s not ignore the obvious by counting out the Judy Garland of it all.
Garland was among the first genuine queer icons. Her popularity among gay men wasn’t a secret either; look at any piece of writing about the concerts she performed in her later years, and you’ll see a number of quite astonishingly homophobic broadsides about the young men who worship her. This is probably the most likely origin of the term ‘Friend of Dorothy’, but it could also come from a mix of different origins. The two most likely options do go hand in hand after all.
In fact, the one thing that we categorically can say about the origin of the term is that there isn’t a real-life Dorothy who all of us gays are actual friends of because that would be patently ridiculous. The idea that there’s this ever-present, ever-elusive person called Dorothy that’s a friend to all queers, Tom from MySpace, but a century earlier, who only the gays can love and trust and absolutely no one else is absurd. What institution could be so witless, uninformed and uninspired to think that was actually the case?
If your answer was an American intelligence service, you’d be a hundred per cent correct!
Wait, someone thought there was an actual person called Dorothy?!
Not one person. That would be understandable, I guess, if someone doesn’t spend a lot of time around queer folks and queer culture and keeps their suspicion to themselves, you could maybe think that Dorothy was a real person. No, this was an entire branch of the Naval Investigative Services, the precursor to the modern-day Naval Criminal Investigative Service. At the time, they were investigating homosexual activity in a naval base in Chicago, and before you ask, this isn’t in the 1940s, this is in the ’80s.
Their leads were based on a few recruits referring to others as ‘Friends of Dorothy’, and even in the ’80s, there was no one working for the Naval Investigative Services who would have the first clue what that actually means. Thus, they began looking for Dorothy. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of taxpayers’ money were spent on a wild goose chase around Chicago searching for this mythical Dorothy, who was clearly corrupting honest American Navy men with her homosexual and communist activities.
Eventually, the investigation was halted because, try as they might, they just couldn’t catch this infernal Dorothy. It was almost like she didn’t exist. Probably because she didn’t. It was a slang term that the finest minds and American intelligence service just couldn’t decode, no matter how hard they tried. Although it’s comical, it’s also a depressing sign of how recently queer people in America and across the world had to live an intensely private personal life of codes and secrecy.
It may have gotten a little better since, but only just.