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“Faggot” or
“For Gay Boys Who Have Considered Rainbows When Suicide Wasn’t Enough”
Call me crazy, bitchy, insane, cat claws clamped on a hot tin roof
Call me fucked up, flipped out, trumped up, over-the-top, a flaming communal manifesto,
but don’t refer to me as “faggot”
I shed that snake-like scaly skin a long time ago, sucker.
Feel free to laugh at my words,
the strange way I cross my eyes and dot my “T’s.”
Laugh harder than my father’s eyes at the extra curves my pronounced lisp lends to the letter “S”
laugh until you’ve busted a gut, craved, contorted, craving more, veins popping from forehead, blue in the face.
Laugh at my words, but not at who I am
I am not your punch line,
so don’t try and make a joke out of me.
Don’t confuse me for your gay uncle, gay neighbor, or the gay trainer at your gym
I’m not a freedom P-FLAG, a tacky upside down pink triangle, or the uncle we never talk about
So, to the random man standing on the J-Church bus line, who kindly referred to me as “faggot” before he punched me in the face without having the decency to collect my first name first,
I say to you, “I am definitely not your faggot.”
Also, to all the freedom fighting in the name of fear of standing up for who you really are queers I went to graduate school with who think “faggot” is only a word,
I say to you,
faggot to me is getting your head thrown into a locker by the straight boy you dream of at night,
it’s being condemned for sex you aren’t even having,
it’s having your first kiss at twenty,
it’s being ten years old, standing in front of your mirror, and mimicking milk commercials,
and maybe it is “just a word,”
but it’s the last word heard by a lot of innocent people just making their way from a car to bar before a baseball bat bashes in their skull,
and I’m willing to bet that if you were able to ask these people,
“faggot” would be more than just a word
More than just the last word they ever heard
More than a blowjob or a misplaced tear falling from their mother’s eye
More than musicals, Paula Poundstone, or a Barbara Streisand song
It would be more than a ft, fad, phase, fist punching up against their face
It would be more than any pain you have ever known, the secret path that gets you from class to class without a swift kick in your ass!
More than Madonna, disco songs, alcohol problems, toenails painted black with an attitude to match,
and I, for one, can say that I am more than just “faggot,”
more than that, indeed.
I am not your punch line,
so don’t try and make a joke out of me.
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