Faggot

Mann Coulter dropped the "F" bomb recently and there's been a lot of brouhaha about it in the press, left and right.

I have to admit that there was a time when I subscribed to the theory that if I (meaning gay people like me) "co-opted" the word and we bandied it about amongst ourselves, then it would, eventually, become drained of meaning. Or at least, drained of hurtful meaning. It would be come a joke, a badge of honor.

That's what I thought in the 70's.

I based it, primarily, on what I thought I was witnessing among gay friends of mine who happened to be black. It was my impression that they routinely referred to each other using the "N" word. "Hey, N-word" I would hear one shout across campus to another. So I thought, "Hey, why can't we do that?"

"Hey, F-word" I longed to shout across campus at a friend. Unfortunately, at the University of Delaware, circa 1974, if you yelled that across campus, 1/2 of the guys would've turned and immediately looked for a fight. Those would've been all the closest cases. The remaining 1/2 was composed of all the straights on campus (about 40%) and all the out gay guys, about 10%. The straights wouldn't have cared less and the gay guys would've simply ignored it, as they'd done since time immemorial.

Anyway, that was my theory.

Until the Repuglicans started appealing to their basest base using the time-worn tactic of fear ("the faggots are looking to teach queerness to your only son"), and the word got scary (again) to a certain, conservative, segment of the population.

Remember, the word isn't meant to be a trigger for me. It's meant to be a trigger for the base. It's specifically designed to arouse fire and hatred in the base. Mann Coulter doesn't give a rat's ass if I buy her books. She does give a rat's ass if the "base" does.

And if Mann Coulter thinks that gay people don't find the F-word offensive, she should drop by my office sometime. So I can personally bitch-slap the c*nt into next month (and that's just a school-yard taunt, so don't take it personally).