Using query_posts to display all tags except ‘something’

I have a case where I need to display all posts that are NOT tagged by a particular tag. I have tried the following without success. The tag ‘featured’ is used here in this example.

query_posts(‘tag=-featured’);
query_posts(‘tags__not_in=featured’);
query_posts(array(‘tag__not_in’ => ‘featured’));

Any idea how I could perform a query to display all posts except ‘featured’? Much thanks in advance!