The F-Word

Sully's got a good post on the latest Coulter kerfuffle, rightly pointing out that "faggot" only works as a slur if one accepts "the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest." In fact, it's an excellent post, until the last line, in which Sully says, "As members of other minorities have been forced to say in the past: I am not a faggot. I am a man."

That's a play on "I am not a boy. I am a man," which refers to, as Sully references, "white men [calling] African-American men 'boys'." The thing is, reappropriating it as I am not a faggot. I am a man. doesn't work quite as well.

Boy v. Man is the denial of whole adult personhood, belittlement via maturity and gravitas. It's much more poignantly and pointedly offensive but is nonetheless akin to the whole idea that antiwar folks aren't "serious" enough to sit at the adult table, and is distantly related to Bill Donohue attempting to diminish Amanda and me by calling us "brats." Boy foremost impugns the very notions of equal personhood, and impugns masculinity second-hand—and only then because we conflate masculinity with seriousness.

Faggot v. Man, however, impugns masculinity directly—and, like Coulter's slur itself, it only works if one accepts "the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest." It's deeply unfortunate that after Sully passionately breaks down why Coulter's slur is such bullshit, he only reinforces that bullshit at the end, by feeling obliged to say, "I am not a faggot. I am a man." It's not personhood he's asserting, but manhood—defined quite deliberately in contradistinction to faggotry and femininity.

More's the pity, from my perspective, that he thusly also reinforces the misogynist smear-by-association implicit in demeaning men by calling them "faggots," based on the understanding of "faggot" as feminine, and hence, less than.

After making so beautifully plain that "there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men," that "gay men whose effeminacy may not make them able to pass as straight" are in fact courageous and tough, and that "gay men are not all effeminate," it would have been brilliant to see Sully instead say: "Yeah, I'm a faggot. What of it?"

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Related: Chet finds more examples of "how difficult it can be to keep right-wing frames from taking over."

Also: Tom Watson just finds a party of bigots.