Gay Slang #4: Hetty
by Petit Fours
I love this word. I can’t claim credit for coining it, I heard it from a lady called Genevive and have remembered it ever after. What is it? A nice friendly contraction of “heterosexual” it covers that wide and wonderful world of people who define by sexual or romantic attraction to the opposite sex. Thus it could be an affectionate term for your straight best friends (“oh I’m just hanging with my hettys tonight”) a way of making threatening examples of heterosexuality seem less alarming and more sort of sweet (“Wayne? oh he’s just one of those hettys that gets het-up around homos…”) or just a way to avoid saying all those extra syllables when referring to the differently-oriented community.
They come in all shapes and sizes:
It’s a spectrum
Not to be confused with:
Girls actually called “Hetty” who may or may not be heterosexual
Hetty’s – a drug awareness clinic in Nottinghamshire
Hetty – the inexplicably personified vaccuum cleaner ( £99.07, tescosdirect)
Hetty – what male hettys call female hippie hettys (thanks urban dictionary) “Typically used in the jam band subculture to describe a modern-day hippie. A hetty chick will wear hemp sandals, no bra, have dreadlocks, and still manage to be sexy”. Those hettys..
Related to: another great piece of gay slang, Hetlagged
My research just turned up this other slang gem:
Hetlagged: “How a gay person feels after having spent the Holidays with their hetero extended family, hetero friends from way back, and generally hetero small town, on the other side of the continent.”
Um, not many of us Brits have the cross-continent problem, but we hear you.
See also: Gay slang vol.1: lesbian toilet party
Hetty was my first word.
Apparently, I used it to address everyone/thing until my vocabulary expanded.
I heard this word for the first time just the other day as i was hanging with my friend and her hettys. She said it like she coined it… the liar!