Here's What They Mean on 'The Crown' When They Say 'Friend of Dorothy'
It's not uncommon for a character on The Crown to drop some British aphorism or aristocratic nomenclature that is unfamiliar to viewers. Judging by recent Google activity, it happened again in Episode 7 of the prestige drama's fourth season, when Queen Elizabeth dropped the phrase "friend of Dorothy" in a conversation with her sister, Princess Margaret, about Margaret's crush, Derek "Dazzle" Jennings.
When a disappointed Margaret tells Elizabeth that Jennings is training to become a priest, the Queen replies, “Well, that’s the second reason he was never the right man or you." The other reason, she jokes, is that Jennings is a "friend of Dorothy."
Some fans were racking their brains about whether Dorothy was a character they'd forgotten, not realizing "friend of Dorothy" is actually a widely-used piece of 20th-Century slang.
What does "friend of Dorothy" mean?
"Friend of Dorothy" first came into use as a synonym for a gay man, although the term has since expanded to be a catchall term for anybody in the LGBTQ+ community. It originated in the first half of the 20th Century, as a coded way to refer to somebody's sexuality when such things weren't openly discussed due to the fact that homosexuality was still criminalized in the United States and United Kingdom.
The Dorothy in question is Dorothy Gale from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, as played by Judy Garland, who was immensely popular among gay men throughout her career and is still widely considered to be a kind of patron saint of queer culture.
Of all Garland's films, The Wizard of Oz is the one that can most easily be viewed as a kind of queer allegory: Dorothy is transported from a sepia-toned Kansas to a Technicolor world, where she befriends three men who all agree to help her in her quest—a heightened and fantastical rendition of many LGBTQ+ people's experience of coming out and finding community and safety outside of their biological family.
Many LGBTQ+ people also saw themselves in Garland's real-life story: her high profile struggles with addiction, mental illness, and volatile relationships, which were all well-documented by the media, would have all felt familiar to people whose lives were similarly vilified in the press.
It is unclear when exactly "friend of Dorothy" became a widely used secret code among the community: it is thought to date back to the 1940s, although it could have been coined even earlier by queer readers of L. Frank Baum's Oz books. What we do know is that it was still in common parlance until at least the 1980s. And this is where it gets good.
At this time, the Naval Investigative Service was trying to root out LGBTQ+ service members, and investigators had caught wind of the term "friend of Dorothy." Having no knowledge of the origins or context of the slang, the NIS agents assumed that there was actually a real woman named Dorothy who aiding and abetting gay men in concealing their then-illegal activities. They launched a search for this accomplice, with the intention of making her inform on her friends.
It goes without saying that Dorothy remained elusive, and continues to be a good friend to the LGBTQ+ community to this day.
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