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It also serves as a reminder that queer people are still a persecuted minority – a fact that gets lost amid a growing commodification of queer culture, with the rainbow-decked Converse sneakers sold during Pride Month or bevy of queer faces in Taylor Swift’s You Need to Calm Down video. “A term used by queer men who celebrate their sex.” Saying fag often makes straight people uncomfortable, allowing queer people to take up space that was previously denied them. “‘Faggot’ is the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the hetero establishment,” Alexander Cheves recently wrote for the LGBTQ+ magazine Advocate. This gives the word a powerful political dimension. “For a person to use a word that once scared them and inhabit its power, what it really says is: ‘I’m not scared of you anymore or this word,’” says the queer sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who in the 1990s began each of his columns with the salutation “Hey Faggot” to great controversy. It became clear to me that something larger was happening in cosmopolitan LGBTQ+ communities: queer men were reclaiming faggot. My gay male friends began throwing the word around to signal their camaraderie. The alt-queer magazine Cakeboy promoted “disruptive faggotry”. In New York, the event organizer Ladyfag’s parties had become synonymous with a trendy night out. Once I saw these playful uses of the word, I started to notice other ones everywhere. “I am GAGGING for you, faggot” /cHpPL8xYzQ- Tom Zohar April 4, 2019 After a character on the Comedy Central cable show The Other Two delivered the immortal line “I’m gagging for you, faggot!”, the outrageous phrase became a shockingly popular meme. I’m not watching that!” was being posted in response to peak-gay things, such as a fan asking the alt-pop star Charli XCX to sign their douche. A low-res clip from 2009 of Tyra Banks exclaiming “Get the fag off the TV. “My Spotify wrapped: You’re a depressed f*ggot aren’t you,” tweeted someone who might have been listening to too much Ariana Grande. Scrolling through social media late last year, I discovered gay men delivering a host of tongue-in-cheek, self-depreciating jokes about it. Recently, though, something strange has begun to happen in my relationship with the word. As a Crossfit-loving guy once put it in his Grindr profile, “No femm fags pls.” We end up policing each other’s queerness through exclusion, and the word “fag” is frequently used to build those borders.
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Toxic thinking overflows in the gay community, where there’s an outsized idolization of rugged masculinity that research shows has serious harmful effects on the queer male psyche. January 24, 2020īut the work I put in to avoid being labeled a fag continued long after I came out of the closet, because I found that even gay men use the word as a verbal punch.