If You Knew Then What I Know Now (17 page)

 

More words to consider: As I write, I begin to question how I place “faggot” into my own sentences. Should it be “to call a man a faggot” or “to name a man a faggot”? The root for
name
comes from Latin
nomen,
which literally means “name.” Not much help. “Call” comes from late Old English
ceallian
, which comes from Old Norse
kallōn,
and means “summon loudly.” There's a difference, even if it's slight—naming a man a faggot means to identify him as a homosexual man, albeit by using a hostile “name”; calling a man a faggot, remembering the root, means the caller (loudly!) wants the attention of the man, even wants him closer, as in
come here, you faggot
.

 

When
faggot
meant “to recant,” it wasn't a name, it was a command. And by recanting to stay alive, the heretic complied, guilty or not.

 

Maybe because I am a gay man, or maybe because I've never actually used the word against one, I realize I'm not even sure why we are called “faggot.” When I try joking about the word,
I always say, “Don't they think we know?” As if the reason to shout out “faggot” is because gay men need reminding—reminding that they're gay, or maybe that they're hated for it. And there's something there too about the need to categorize, to put everybody back in the places where they supposedly belong. But. There are “gay” and “homosexual,” and other words to distinguish us, after all. These are the “real” names, but ones rarely shouted out, or used as taunts like “faggot.”

I understand the reason why a straight man would call another one “faggot”—which isn't to say it's any less offensive. But the suggestion is that the man in question isn't really a
man
—he's soft or weak or effeminate, etc. It's a jab at his manhood, at his gender but also his masculinity—that mysterious concoction of biology and swagger and toughness and ease that is nearly impossible to fake. I've tried. But—and I'm assuming this, that's all I can do—because the man is straight and because he knows he's not gay, he feels the word differently than I do. It's certainly insulting, and possibly threatening, but there's some essential difference in the intention that carries something more demeaning for gay men.

But isn't calling a straight man “faggot” always still an insult to gay men? Conservative writer Ann Coulter tried denying this fact in March 2007, after she implied during a speech in Washington that senator and Democratic presidential nominee John Edwards was a faggot. A few days after her remarks, on Fox News' program
Hannity and Colmes
, she offered this defense:
“The word I used has nothing to do with sexual preference. It isn't offensive to gays. It has nothing to do with gays. It is a schoolyard taunt meaning ‘wuss.' And unless you're telling me that John Edwards is gay, it was not applied to a gay person.” She's right on only one point—she didn't call John Edwards “gay.” Calling him “a homosexual” would have been toothless. But with his $400 haircuts, bright smile, and lovely moisturized skin, calling Edwards “faggot” actually bites—which is why the story had so much traction in the media in the days following the slur. Because she's not saying that John Edwards is sexually attracted to men; she's saying he
passes
for a man sexually attracted to men—and also implying such slippage disqualifies him from politics. We all know of his marriage and mistress but that doesn't make him a
man
, and only a man can be president. And yes, it is a schoolyard taunt, but not one that simply means “wuss,” and that was clear in fourth grade. What's also clear is calling John Edwards “faggot” is perceived as an insult to him because it's an insult to gay men—straight men don't just laugh it off; they fight back because a faggot is someone already pushed aside and trivialized. Even in
A Bundle of Sticks
when our hero Ben finally stands up to the bully, he defends himself by asking, “How can I have a girlfriend . . . if I'm supposed to be a faggot?” But defending yourself against the taunt when you're actually gay doesn't come with any such reliable escape hatch.

 

We learn our names only by being called them.

I was most recently called “faggot” two months ago. I was riding my bike in my Midwestern college town, late at night as the bars were emptying. While I pedaled through an intersection, a young guy, probably a student like one of my students, called the word out to me. I just kept riding. I've never found a good enough comeback. There really isn't an argument because according to the dictionary, it's true—I am gay, so yes, I am a faggot.

 

There's something else going on underneath that I wish I could ignore. Once, as a very closeted undergraduate, I was at a party with my two closest friends, a straight woman and a gay man. The party was crowded, and most of the men there were straight. In those years, when I was being honest with myself, I knew I was gay, but I was trying desperately not to be—bargaining with God every night in prayer to help me stop thinking
that way
about men, and occasionally even dating women. Before the party, we had some drinks and, after arriving, did shots together in the kitchen of the too-hot house. As we wiped our tingling lips and shook off our quick jolts of vodka, I looked across the living room and a single face stood out.

He was the best combination possible of pretty boy and those clichéd chiseled features of tall, dark, and handsome. Except he wasn't that tall—he was about my height with the veiny, tight skin of a runner shown off by rolled-up sleeves.
Lovely clean-shaven cheeks, short brown hair, a jawline as sharp and solid as a table's edge and big, soft eyes. I couldn't stop staring.

And in my drunkenness, I forgot myself, and kept staring. I forgot I was pretending I wasn't gay, and forgot too that not all men appreciated adoration from other men, confused, innocent, or otherwise. After a couple more hours of drinking and gazing, on our way out the front door, stumbling behind my two friends, we passed this man, and as I looped my eyes toward him to snag one final glance, he leaned in a few inches from my face, and sneered, “Faggot.”

No one heard it but me. My friends and I walked outside and got halfway to the car before I said anything. “Some guy just called me a ‘faggot,'” I said, nearly chuckling. “What?” asked my gay friend. I repeated, and he was incensed, certainly fueled by his own relationship with the word.

“Who?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Some guy by the door.”

He marched back toward the party, leaving me and my other friend standing in the street. “It's not a big deal!” I called out, but he kept going. Of course I'd left out the most important piece of the truth. And it makes me wonder if there are moments when gay men might actually deserve scorn—at that party, leering at an obviously straight man, was I being a faggot?

If I've known since fourth grade that what is intended by the word is not how it's defined, then why does it still burn? There must be violence and hatred carried in it, even if I can't locate the satisfying, definitive connection on paper. If it isn't to voice a desire to destroy us, then why call gay men “faggots”?

But even after what I've uncovered, I'm unsettled because words aren't simply good or evil. Shouldn't I feel inspired because as a writer I need words to be beautiful, and even powerful, as well as ugly and dangerous? Shouldn't I of all people know that a word's potential for comfort or harm rests in how it is used? So if the letters themselves are innocent, if the meaning isn't in the word, or just in the word, then it's us carrying around those threats and violence. Like a recanting heretic, I'm the one complying with the word's hatred, and allowing it to bear down on me—the way it surely will until I harden myself against hearing it. Such a revelation is both startling and obvious, and I'm stuck there, bound up in that original trick of the word: When I wince at its sting, I share its intention—if only for a second.

H
ope is a goldfish in a plastic bag of water: the weight of the bag in your hands, how the cold bundle must be cradled to prevent jostling the poor creature inside; the transparency of the bag, how white your hands look through the water, the plastic wrinkles that gather around the ridges of your fingers; the goldfish itself, which isn't really gold, or just gold—it bobs around and if you're driving home from the fish store, riding beside your roommate, there's the inevitable moment when the fish will ease into his surroundings, float to the bottom of the bag resting in the warm palm of your hand, and as the car rounds a curve, you feel the flutter of his translucent tail against your skin through the plastic.

This goldfish meant hope because we hoped the one in our bag would be one to survive. Not just three weeks, but years, the way goldfish are supposed to. We hoped it wasn't one with that goldfish parasite called “Ich,” short for “Ichthyophthirius” but everyone thinks is “Ick” because it's a parasite, which is gross. We hoped we wouldn't have to flush the fish in a few days if we found him with his pale belly turned toward the ceiling of the
water. We hoped that buying all this fish stuff wasn't wasting our money.

But also because of the delicacy involved—floating the bag in the new bowl for an hour to allow the fish to adjust temperatures, treating our Chicago tap water with mysterious chemical drops—the goldfish was hope: this fragile thing who was dependent on us and our care, silent and colorful and ours to name.

I can't remember if it was my roommate Kim or me who first thought of getting a goldfish. And I can't remember who suggested his name—Rufus—though it was probably me. After Rufus Wainwright, our favorite singer at the time, and the man I called my boyfriend because I had the biggest and most hopeless of crushes on him, and because I didn't have an actual boyfriend. I used to say that Rufus the man brought me more pleasure than any of the men I'd actually dated. His picture was taped to the refrigerator door, I owned all his albums, went to every nearby performance—that kind of thing. Rufus the fish was always supposed to have a companion, another fish that we planned to name after a cute actor from some TV show, whose name I can't remember, but we never made it back to the fish store.

So on a bright Sunday afternoon in Chicago in March, Kim and I ripped open a sack of brown gravel and dumped an inch in Rufus's new glass bowl. The guy at the fish store had steered us away from pointy plastic seaweed and gave us instead a clipping of some soft green vine—an actual plant—that coiled
through the water like a spiral staircase. We also got a chunk of driftwood instead of one of those pink plastic castles or bubbling sunken treasure chests. The moment we untied the watery sack and poured Rufus into his bowl, we stared at him swimming around, and it felt good, because it was something we could share, and something that we needed.