What will you remember when you look back on the summer of 2023? Will it be the pink-drenched colours and plastic smiles of the Barbie movie? The one-in-a-lifetime show-womanship of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour? Or the moment you lost faith in cishet marriage once the news of RHOBH’s Kyle Richards and Mauricio Umansky separation hit the tabloids? Regardless of whatever pop culture debris sticks with you – like Pride glitter stubbornly pressed against sweaty skin – we already know the song that will be playing in the background as memories flash in front of your eyes like an iPhone photo montage. Yep, it’s ‘Padam Padam’. 

Those two words, consisting of two syllables with little discernible meaning, have well and truly taken over LGBTQIA+ life over the past few months. If you need a recap (who can remember life before?) the infectious single, containing a truly hypnotic chorus, comes courtesy of grande dame of queer pop Kylie Minogue and first dropped back in May. Then, it soon began to reverberate throughout the queer underground – soundtracking Pride club nights, joyful days at Mighty Hoopla, lipsyncs by Drag Race legends and camp TikToks chez Hobbycraft Wimbledon – before reaching the UK Top 10 in late June. And, as its presence during Pride in London attested, it shows no sign of leaving the queer ether any time soon.

Admittedly, it comes as little surprise that a Kylie track would become the queer anthem of the summer – shout out to Charli XCX’s ‘Speed Drive’ for coming a close second – but what might have you somewhat more puzzled is the velocity with which the LGBTQIA+ community adopted the word “padam” as their latest queer catchphrase. Exclamations like “slay” or “purr” – while arguably waning for some time now – have officially been left to rot in the graveyard of forgotten gay slang. Instead, “padam” is the only answer – no matter what the question may be – in queer life. Hell, we’ve even got it into Parliament – with MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle namechecking “padam padam” in the House of Commons to mark Pride. 

What does “padam” mean?

But what does it actually mean? When I ask the community at large what they think “padam” signifies, the answer is varied. To some, such as designer Grete, it’s as simple as “being a slut (complementary)”. Others, such as queer music professional François, argue that the word transcends meaning; “Honestly, I don’t think it’s intellectualisable, it’s a vibrant je ne sais quoi. Maybe a frequency that makes our cells happy.” Urban Dictionary, which may not always be so reliable but is, at the very least, frequently updated, suggests that padam is about embodying a certain level of iconicness and impressing that upon others; “An onomatopoeia for the sound a heartbeat makes when you’re a diva who’s slaying, coined by Kylie Minogue.”

Clearly, there’s a lot of conflicting definitions out there. One of the most commonly cited meanings can be found in the video by creator Chris (which has been liked over 280,000 times, FYI) where two queer interviewees reply, without the slightest hesitation, “padam” when asked what their favourite gay slang of the moment is. They then elaborate that the word simply means “being gay and having a great time” which, yeah, kind of tracks – after all, don’t we all just want to enjoy ourselves after all the doom and gloom of the past few years?