Faggot
By: Luke Lakatosh
Tags: Identity, Queer, Sexuality, Gender, Peace

This is not new.

This is not an indictment.

I hear the word for the first time at some point when I’m — how old? I don’t know. I know I’m younger than six because of where I live. It’s a long time before I’ll be cognizant of sexual orientations or homosexuality or anything. I do see what they say it about — kids who aren’t good at sports, kids who piss them off. It’s a transitory thing — you can do a thing and then you’re a faggot, but maybe you’re not a faggot all the time. How much of a faggot you are is determined by how much you get to say it about other people.

At six years old I don’t know exactly what my friends mean when they say it, but it’s clear it means WRONG. A faggot is a male, wrong in a specific kind of way. Cerebral sensibilities? Emotionally sensitive? Can’t catch or throw a ball? Accidentally spill your drink on your friend? All fags. These are all things I do and am, so being wrong in all those ways, then, they mean me.

“Faggot” means wrong, and it also means me. Even if they’re not saying it at me.

Ten long years later I’ll have a rager on top of me, pummeling my face while he froths the word. A few short years after that I’ll have a drunk middle-aged man kissing my cheek in a bar a thousand miles away from home while he murmurs it in my ear, a pastiche of confused love. A few years after that, during the Columbine goth panic, I hear it when I’m pushed against the side of a restaurant by a hand grasping my shirt at the neck.

I’m born in 1978 and grow up in Mattel’s 1980s. Whole worlds created for us to work with imaginatively, preferably with sanctioned pieces of plastic. There are army soldiers with lasers in their cartoons and robots that turn into cars and infinite possibilities. It’s so compelling that even when we’re outside, without our plastic capitalism icons, we still choose these worlds to inhabit. Who’s going to be He-Man? Who Snake Eyes? Who Optimus and who’s going to be the faggot stuck being the Sorceress?

Even at this age all the male characters are tedious to me. I’m slight. I can’t hit or catch a ball. I’m not adept with volition and imposing it on others. Those male characters mean nothing to me — they’re not something I aspire to, not something I can ever be. They’re not like me at all. Already being picked on for all these traits, they actually already represent a threat. They’re very much like the people around me who make me feel small. First Sergeant Conrad S. Hauser isn’t a positive role model to me. Duke would call me a faggot.

So I don’t MIND being Sorceress. Or Baroness. Or Carly Witwicky. These are interesting characters who get their shit done smartly, learning the rules and structures and working around it. They’re beautiful and mysterious and skilled and everything seems to be about them in the end, the reason behind things, the unseen hand. I don’t really know about gender and identity yet but I sure as shit know I want to be the UNSEEN HAND. Why is there anything wrong with that? I don’t know, but I know I’m a fag if it doesn’t bother me.

For a time in youth I have a periodic semi-long-term physical relationship with a male I cared about a great deal. I’m certain this wouldn’t be this person’s characterization of this, and that’s okay. It’s all right if I end up in a different place and therefore my experiences, even those shared with others, have a completely different context for me. I have a tough time parsing this and distance myself from the experience and person. (In a way this piece is an apology to this person. I’m sorry.)

I have a new group existing entirely separate from this and during my teens, after a few more relationships of both types, I simultaneously realize I am, one, an atheist; two, equally open to relationships with males and females; and three, completely divorced from the notion of maleness as it is presented to me. I feel safe enough with my friends to come out religiously and sexually, but I still have a hard time defining the gender portion of it and still feel incomplete. This is a lot to process in one teenage year.

There’s been three lifetimes since then, lots of relationships and interactions of all flavors and varieties, and throughout the whole thing I’ve really had very little struggle with who I was. Honestly, this has never been in question for me. Granted, for a long time I just thought I was wrong and didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t have public role models that were available to me that I could identify with — they were there, but I didn’t know how to see them. In a state of not knowing myself, I didn’t know how to think about myself as anything but a fag.

But that’s all okay, truly. Because now I’ve ended up okay with who I am by defining it myself. I had to make up my own terms for it. If I had access to the vocabulary of today, things might be different, but it’s okay. I am completely at peace with my identity.

So why do this now? I’m middle aged and the aging process is dumping alien chemicals into me, causing me to act not as I should. The last ten years have seen an alarmingly rapid disintegration of a patience I’d carefully built and cultivated immediately post adolescence — I was an impatient and emotional child, and I had to actively work at being a kind and decent human being. Now frustration can slip close to rage.

Anger is often mislabeled as a male impulse, and for sure there is such a thing as male rage. But my anger is the sensitive feminine flavor. I’m constantly worried about being correctly understood, not being hurt, not hurting others, and simultaneously I am driven to not care what people think. In that sense certain aspects of my inner life have become a hellish struggle, and it’s because I haven’t properly reconciled my public and inner selves.

Without writing this and going public with it, I’m allowing my experiences, my life, to be wrong. In the end, I married a woman and I’m living as a man. So therefore, everything not in that lane is just wrongness, unless I claim it and proudly state that it is who I am. This is so untrue and such a betrayal of all of the honest living that I did before. The fact is that there is no “before and after.” I am who I am, and my experiences as a not-man and not-with-a-woman are valid and righteous parts of my path.

This is not a secret. Most of my friends I have now knew this before they even met me. This isn’t something I’ve been hiding or that I wasn’t at terms with. I’ve known this very clearly about myself long before I met almost every single one of you. I am not particularly guarded about it, but I still haven’t owned it. I used to think this was not important, that I didn’t need a label. I still think that — in fact, I think I’ve found myself at a place that’s probably natural for a lot more people than we realize, but those arguments also edge uncomfortably close to “gay is a choice” and I’m not down with that shit either. But ironically the queer people in my life are ones who came into my life after this was something I talked about frequently. I wasn’t “working it out” anymore, and I got married, so the whole thing seemed needless to talk about.

But people are dying, people I understand, a community I’m a member of by fact and biology but not by an active choice on my part. I’m making that choice now. I’ve been quietly fighting alongside my queer friends and never really explaining why. I’ll say why I’m doing this with three apologies: to my queer friends, to my straight friends, and to myself.

To my queer friends: It’s not fair of me to claim to be an ally and not publicly claim who I am, and I’m sorry I haven’t. There have been times that what I had to say would have helped you when you were confiding in me. When you were going through things that most people could never understand, I should have made it clearer that I knew exactly what you were talking about and that we had a shared experience.

To my straight friends: It wasn’t super important to me to tell you these things for a few reasons, not least of which is I have tended to assume that you knew. Therefore I thought it wouldn’t matter if you did. Over the years some of the things you’ve said to me, assuming I was cis and straight like you, you probably wouldn’t have said to me. It wasn’t fair of me to assume that you knew and just didn’t care, either positively or negatively.

To myself: All of my reasons for not allowing my inner identity to match my outward one were flawed and wrong. I’ve done you wrong by not allowing you the comfort of vocabulary, the sanctity of an identity that didn’t feel like a mask most of the time.

So what am I? I’m not sure any of the current descriptors actually matches it. In a social sense I am a married straight cis male. But here’s the thing. If I had met the person who is my wife and they occupied a male body, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference to me.

For the cis part, the best way I can tell you who I am is to describe how I feel. I don’t necessarily believe this literally, but this is how it feels. If reincarnation is a thing, I feel like a soul that has done a lot of rounds occupying a woman’s body, and this go-around I’m in a man’s body and it’s fucking WEIRD. It’s always been weird.

I just call myself a person that feels lucky they don’t have to deal with the limitations and hangups my peers seem to have. This has come with the unfortunate consequence of having been in danger quite a few times in my life. Listen, I acknowledge that I’m a middle-class white guy. Any damage to me certainly would have been much worse if I was in literally ANY other cohort. But I’ve been threatened; I’ve been beaten. I’ve been mocked and I’ve seen the angry and terrified mask of rage that people wear when they’re willing and ready to destroy me, to obliterate me. I got to walk away from those faces relatively unscathed; for some, it’s the last thing they see.

This is why I will never tolerate things that are happening right now. So many people talking like they’re the ones put upon, that somehow people like me (who are statistically lucky to survive adolescence without killing themselves) are some kind of status quo forcing you to live in our world. YOU are the status quo. You’re the one with the system on your side. You’re the one whose buddy called me a faggot. You’re not responsible for his actions, but I can no longer continue to let you pretend like you know how it is. You don’t, but if you listen to us and have the patience to let us articulate, I’ll try to help you see.

What we call people is important. If someone requests certain pronoun usage, or a different name, or to refrain from usage of other words, this is not an attempt to control you, nor is it an indictment of your straightness. The person in question has just gone through a tremendously traumatic psychological transformation. They’re not making a choice to follow a trend or make you uncomfortable; they’re sacrificing their old identity for a new one that better matches how they feel on the inside. The words you’d like to use to refer to them don’t mean the same thing to you as they do to them. HIM or HER might cut like knives to them, reinvigorating traumas and experiences that you don’t understand. Instead of being angry at this request that costs you literally nothing, consider empathy and what this person has gone through.

This is not about putting down straight and cis people, but it is about putting down the mindset of anger initiated by someone else’s “otherness” from your experiences. These people are in danger, not just physically, but actually primarily psychologically. When they choose to come out, regardless of their support structure, they are vulnerable, terrified, and hopefully protected by kind people who can recognize the need for support and respond to it. When I came out as bisexual, I had such people who took care of me. Those same people have been taking care of me now, in the last months as I’ve been writing this.

Ignoring someone’s ask to change the way you think about them is an act of aggression. Words can be weapons, and my purpose here is to help you understand that the words you use don’t always mean the same thing to you as they might to someone hearing you.

For all the people out there wondering who they are, who they can be, where they fit: YOU ARE WHOEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT TO BE. It has nothing to do with anyone else besides your community, your family, chosen or given. Live your life. LOVE YOUR LIFE. Love who you want to love.

AND BE WHO YOU ARE.

There is no such thing as “normal,” and it certainly isn’t something to aspire to. You don’t have to fit an idea of how someone else thinks you should be.

I see you. And wherever you land, do your best to not hurt anyone, and you are good in my book. I see you and I am here for you. I didn’t know how to be seen when I was growing up. I didn’t have words for what I am. The only word I had was faggot.

Every time a wounded person expects someone to wound them further and they instead respect them and care for them, it’s not a neutral gain. They actually heal from that. You all have the capability to damage and to heal in every interaction that you have. Words can be weapons, or they can heal. The same muscles make both types of words; it’s the heart that’s different.

So you can call me whatever you want. Call me gay, bisexual, gender fluid. Call me queer, call me him or her. Call me ill; call me brave. Call me Duke or call me Sorceress. I am all of these things.

You can even call me faggot.

Just know that it doesn’t mean what you think it does.