Every so often I hear straight men claiming that epithets like “faggot” don’t really refer to homosexuals. Rather, they say, it refers to ineffectual men who can’t take care of themselves or anyone else, who can’t give a woman what she needs, men who are cowardly and despicable, men who aren’t Real Men. (I don’t have any links at the moment, though I’ll try to add some the next time I encounter the claim online. I think I’ve seen Eminem and some other rappers saying such things, and I've read similar rationalizations about maricón in Mexican culture. Someone is playing a racist variation on the game here. To see how homophobic epithets are actually used by normal red-blooded American males -- haw haw haw! I can't believe I wrote that with a straight face! -- read some of the comments to this video. I'm still trying to figure out why it generated such hysteria.)
Since “gay” became a schoolyard epithet, soon after we queers mainstreamed it as a more-or-less neutral, non-clinical term for ourselves, I’ve heard the same thing about it as well. It’s true, some of the people who say “that’s so gay” are gay-friendly at other times, have gay friends, and pay liberal lip service to gay issues. And since we did claim the right to use “gay” for ourselves over the protests of our generation of genteel homophobes, I suppose we can’t really say that it has only one fixed meaning, and we shall stop linguistic change from happening in this one area forevermore.
That might even be the best response to “that’s so gay”: to recognize and, as necessary, point out that in that context, it has nothing to do with either the pre-1970 “gay” (“Don we now our gay apparel, fa-la-la fa-la-la la-la-la”) or the post-1970 homosexual “gay” (Gay Pride Now!).
Still, I don’t think any gay man who’s ever been called a fucking faggot (which means pretty much all of us) will take this claim seriously. “Faggot” refers not only to despicable, ineffectual men of any sexual orientation, but to men who have sex with other men, because in masculist culture men who have sex with other men are assumed to be despicable, ineffectual, etc. -- and fucked, in various senses of the word. There’s nothing more horrible in the masculine imagination than being penetrated anally: it takes away a man’s manhood as effectively as castration. For a man to enjoy being penetrated, to seek out the experience, is not thinkable (even if it’s not unknown to the men who deploy homophobic epithets). Gay liberationists were correct that shouting one’s fagitude to the world was a powerful challenge to the male supremacist order; that’s why gay liberation is now history, and today’s gay movement ambivalently calls for gender conformity, except for its reliably successful drag fundraisers.
“Faggot” and its synonyms are the equivalents for males of “whore” and its synonyms for women. What the Faggot and the Slut (as mythic figures) have in common is that they have been penetrated, and are therefore polluted, unclean. In both cases, the target of the epithet may not literally have been penetrated: boys may be targeted because they don’t fit in with other boys, regardless of their sexuality, and girls ditto – a girl may be called a Slut simply because she’s begun to develop breasts earlier than her age mates. But the words are (I think this is the right use of the term) performative: by calling you a faggot or a whore, I symbolically penetrate you, establish my manhood, earn and reinforce my membership in the men’s house. (Girls call each other “slut” too.) There are some interesting books on the words for women, starting with Leora Tannenbaum’s Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation (Seven Stories, 1999) and Emily White’s Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (Scribner, 2002), but they don’t go deeply enough – I could sense the authors drawing back from the abyss. I don’t know of any books (or any significant writings at all) which deal with the words for men, though Richard Trexler’s Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Polity Press, 1995) has some useful discussion, as does Geng Song’s The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (Hong Kong UP, 2004). There’s a lot more thinking to be done about this; I’m just trying out some ideas now.
Meanwhile, what about the males who say that “faggot” refers to somebody else, the cowardly, ineffectual, effeminate guys – and not to their Homo-American buddies? It’s tempting to point out that effeminate men, the sissies who got harassed and beaten up by the Real Men all their lives, are fundamentally tougher than any macho man – but that would be a mistake, partly because it plays into their ritual of competitive toughness and partly because at best it can only send the bullies off in search of someone they can still feel entitled to degrade as a not-man. That’s probably the core point right there: “faggot” does not say anything about the man who’s called one – it does say volumes about the fears and inadequacies of the men who use it as a token in their pathetic dominance games.
