Nancy

Nancy is an old derogatory term for an effeminate man or a gay man, drawn from the female first name to imply femininity. Its roots run deep: 'Miss Nancy' appears as a mocking label for a fussy, effeminate man by the 1820s, the shortened 'nance' by 1924, and 'nancy boy' by the late 1930s. In 1930s American burlesque, 'the nance' was even a stock campy gay character on stage. Alongside words like pansy, fairy, and nelly, nancy was part of the vocabulary of anti-gay insult in twentieth-century Britain and America. Some men have reclaimed such terms with camp humor, while others reject them outright. The word reflects the long cultural habit of treating effeminacy and homosexuality as the same thing.