poofter
English
Alternative forms
- poofta
- pooftah
Etymology
From poof + -er.
Pronunciation
Audio (AUS) (file)
Noun
poofter (plural poofters)
- (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, derogatory, slang) A male homosexual, especially an effeminate one.
- 1908 November 20, Sydney Montgomery, “Paranoia with some Cases”, in Australasian Medical Gazette, volume 27, number 11, Australasian Medical Association, ISSN 0314-5158, OCLC 427188481, pages 598-602:
- Another man told me he was a "poofter," but I never was able to get a definition of this word from him.
- 1943, John Bostock and Evan Jones, The nervous soldier: a handbook for the prevention, detection and treatment of nervous invalidity in war, page 11,
- Hallucinations, again, are the expression of repressed systems of ideas and desires; for example a man who has strong repressed homo-sexual tendencies may hear voices calling him a poofter.
- 1964, Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice, page 36,
- "You pommy poofter. You give me any more of that liberal crap and I'll have your balls for a bow tie." Bond said mildly, "What's a poofter?" "What you'd call a pansy. No," Dikko Henderson got to his feet and fired a string of what sounded like lucid Japanese at the man behind the bar, […] .
- 2007, John Mendoza, Mad Blue Smoke, Pasini Press, Melbourne, Australia, page 113,
- I just ignored them because I didn't think what I did made me a poofter. Me and Dwayne were best friends, and it was only because there were no girls around, and I liked it. My father taught me that homosexuality was unnatural, and that poofters were men who couldn't form relationships with women because they were horrifying, repulsive queers.
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- (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, derogatory, slang) A pansy, an effeminate man.
Usage notes
Poofter is nowadays one of the most pejorative words in Australian English, perhaps because of its use in the phrase poofter-bashing, which arose during the 1960s and 1970s during organised hate crimes against homosexuals across Australia and particularly in the Sydney district of King's Cross, a major centre of Sydney's gay social life.[1] Beyond its use as a anti-homosexual slur, it is also often aimed at males who do not conform to normative ideals of masculinity in other ways, particularly in the fields of art or academia.
Synonyms
- See Thesaurus:male homosexual
Derived terms
- woofter
References
- Francoeur, R. T., and Noonan, R. J. (eds.) The Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, p.33. Continuum: New York.
Anagrams
- foretop