(warning: raunchy vocabulary, but surmounting the raunch is the point; still, over the line for kids and the sexually modest)
Well, a two-word phrase. Which I very carefully framed — in yesterday’s posting “Getting picked” — in this passage:
I’m a whoring faggot in deep disguise — also a lot of other, socially more decorous, things, but I’m that too
Now, that’s two incendiary words, both generally lobbed as insults, condemnations, or accusations: whoring ‘sexually promiscuous, esp. for payment’ and faggot. I want them back, and I’ll ding at them until they lose their power for other people as well as me. I’ve been working on faggot for decades and will continue to plug away at it. I have the Fuck Me Like the Whore I Am t-shirt — but have never worn it because that would be false advertising: whore, yes, with a rich history of many sexual partners, a lot of them classifiable as tricks of one sort or another (this is a rich and complex world); enthusiast for getting fucked, jesus yes; available to any random dick off the street, absolutely not.
So part of the program is normalization of various kinds of everyday and widespread sexual practices. But my goal is deeper than that.
The terminology of insult, condemnation, and accusation conveys two things: some root attribution of sexual desire, practice, or identity (for which there is less incendiary vocabulary) — PLUS some content that is genuinely reprehensible, worthy of censure: some bad stuff. And I say: show me the bad stuff. As a riddle: How is a faggot not like a gay man?
And people will tell you that faggots are the bad gays, the nasty gays, the obvious ones, the effeminate ones, with lisps, the ones that are too gay, flaunt their gayness, talk about sex too much, go on marches for butt-fucking, stick to their own kind, and so on.
In this world, then, what is a non-faggot gay? Be specific, give examples, you say, and what you get is men — or ideas of men — whose gayness is in fact completely invisible. Whose sexual desires, practices, and identities aren’t out in the world in any way. No-gay gays. This is social death, and no one should be subjected to it.
There are unpleasant, even wicked, people everywhere, including the gigantic world of male-male sexuality. But mostly there ‘s an extraordinary variety of ways of composing gay-sexual lives and integrating them with all the rest of our lives. Claim: faggots are in fact just gay men. Period. The word faggot does have more punch to it, thanks to the echoes of its nasty history, so I treasure it.
And I say, tongue in cheek, of being a faggot: not that there’s anything wrong with that!
From Wikipedia:
“The Outing” is the 57th episode of the sitcom Seinfeld. First aired on February 11, 1993 on NBC, it is the 17th episode of the fourth season. In this episode, a journalism student reports on Jerry and George’s close companionship, which becomes understood as the two of them coming out. The line “… not that there’s anything wrong with that” — as a reference to homosexuality — has become a popular catchphrase among fans.
Then, as with faggot, I’d say good things about whore and whoring. But not today; it’s been a long day. A really good day, but it’s over now.
