If You Knew Then What I Know Now (16 page)

Miss Fletcher then comes to Ben's rescue by demanding that Boyd tell the room the meaning of “faggot.” When his definition (“It's a guy who . . . you know . . . kisses other guys and stuff”) doesn't satisfy her, the teacher sends Boyd to the class dictionary. And “faggot,” it turns out, surprising Boyd, Ben, and the rest of the class, means “a bundle of sticks.” The author doesn't describe Miss Fletcher's face in this pivotal moment, but I've imagined her smug smile, and her high-heeled shoe tapping triumphantly. As she orders Boyd back to his chair, she tells the class that any definition besides the one printed in the dictionary is slang, and therefore not appropriate.

I don't doubt that the author intended for that scene to educate her readers and disarm “faggot.” Probably the bigger lesson was Ben could and should karate chop straight through his metaphorical bundle and splinter the sting of name-calling into pieces. But in my fourth-grade classroom, instead of becoming a word without power, “faggot” became a word anybody could say any time without fear of retribution. Girls were called “faggot,” boys were called “faggot.” If a classmate cut in the lunch line, if one boy splashed another with water from the bathroom sink, if one kid threw out another in the daily kickball game at recess, all of them were faggots. And if our teacher or some other school adult overheard, the defense always pulled from back pockets was something like, “What's the big deal? All I called him was a bundle of sticks?” Instead of making the word obsolete, the definition gave it cover. Objections became groundless. Because
it's so simple that even a room full of nine-year-olds could figure it out: there's a difference between how a word is defined and what it really means.

No coincidence then that fourth grade was also the year when I was first called “gay.” One evening after school, a classmate who lived on the next street over called me into the dark tent of trees behind our houses. Out of his slick jacket, he pulled a copy of a pornographic magazine he'd swiped from his dad's bedroom. We crouched together in the shadows, huddling close to the edge of a creek bank, as crickets vibrated invisibly around us. On the pages he turned for the both of us, the women were naked and between their legs, quite unexpectedly, was hair. And I was so surprised by that strange secret of the female body that all I could say to my proud classmate's grin was “Gross.” But in my one word, more meaning than I had intended was revealed. The next day at school, during a group photograph of the class, I sat in the front row with the other extremely short fourth-grade boy. As the teacher and the photographer directed us, telling us to sit or stand up straight, to scoot in closer, fix collars, and remove hands from pockets, this boy turned to me. “You're gay, you know,” he said. “You're gay because you think
Playboy
is gross.”

 

I decide to go looking for “faggot” myself, to know what those voices are really saying when they snarl it, to uncover its violence inside. In the second edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
,
published by Clarendon Press in 1989, nearly three pages are devoted to the word and its many derivatives. The word isn't as simply defined as it was in Miss Fletcher's fictional classroom. I scribble down some of the definitions of the noun and verb forms—surprised there's a verb form at all.

 

noun:

verb:

The tightly-packed black columns are almost dizzying. As I stand over the book, thick and worn and split-open under my eyes, just one of several volumes of the
OED
, I think that more than any other, this word has probably been the biggest of my life. I've feared it; when I've heard it, it's caused the most instantaneous effect on my body, and still does—the same heat rising to my face like the character in that fourth-grade book. And it can still trick me, as it did in that conversation with my friend.

So given my history with the word, I can't help but read phrases like “fry a faggot” or “to set (a person) on the faggots preparatory to burning” literally. This is what I want—the threat, for the word to
be
dangerous and not just feel that way. And certainly it's melodramatic, but I suddenly can't help but consider every time I've been called “faggot,” and think that person wanted me burned because of who I am. But at least in this dictionary, in these uses, burning a “faggot” doesn't mean a gay man.

 

Do I reach too far into the idea of burning when I wonder about the joking expression, familiar among gay people, “a flaming queen?”

On the shelf beside the
OED
is a lineup of etymological dictionaries. In one, the
Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories
, published by Wellington House, 1999, I find this entry for “faggot”:

Especially the French and Italian threads of origin (the Italian actually means
bassoon
) disappoint me. I wanted to see in print the connection between burning sticks and burning gay men. I pull down book after book, hunting through pages for proof. There's no denying that violence is carried inside it—centuries of burning heretics alive and “abuse” toward women—but I hoped to find actual documentation, validation of my feeling. Something like the smoking gun, instead of just smoldering handful of sticks.

And I'm surprised that the word was first used as an insult to women, four centuries before homosexual men. I'm surprised because I've always considered “faggot” as implicitly misogynistic, so finding this proof—however disturbing—is
heartening. To call a man “faggot” is to brand him as too effeminate, too feminine. Which implies there's something wrong with being feminine, especially for a man. So doesn't hating a man because he acts like a woman suggest some hatred for women, too? Or, at the very least, doesn't it demand some neatness to our categories? That goes there and this goes here, let's please keep everything tidy. But the reason behind such tidiness—why we comply and keep everything and everyone in their separate boxes—and whether that reason is always already ingrained in us, seems too impossible at the moment to root out.

 

I have only ever been called “faggot” by men, never by women.

 

In middle school, I stopped wearing dress shirts with that small sewn-in loop of cloth on the back beneath the yoke and between the shoulder blades. Boys would snag their hooked fingers on this loop, yank it and yell, “fag tag!” Some even tried tearing it off, as if saving you from something dangerous, like a wasp you didn't see clinging to your back. I never told my mother why I suddenly stopped wearing half of my wardrobe; I just said I didn't like them anymore and hoped she didn't notice the tiny feature the unwanted shirts had in common.

So with the single syllable
fag
, I began to fear and hate a small inch-long strip of cloth. But why was that thing called a “fag tag”? Because only fags would want shirts with such unnecessary embellishments? Or because the loop is like the
string, ribbon, or cord bundling all those bundles of sticks? I look for the actual name of the cloth loop, but find nothing on my own. I ask a reference librarian if there is such a thing as a fashion dictionary, a garment glossary? I tell him I need to know the name of a certain part of a man's shirt. The librarian says there might be apparel guides with this kind of information—which part am I looking for?

“It's that loop of cloth on the back of a man's shirt, sewn under the yoke, in the middle.”

“Well, I know the rude slang term we used in school,” he says. “But that probably doesn't help you.”

And it turns out there isn't any one agreed-upon term for that loop, even in apparel dictionaries, though in one clothing company's catalogs, my librarian does find “locker loop.” Even so, the most common name for a nameless thing is a hateful one.

 

I thought of that loop of cloth when I read one of the obscure definitions of
faggot
, the one about heretics having to wear “the embroidered figure of a faggot . . . as an emblem of what they had merited.” The small embroidered figure I imagine is cartoonish—half Boy Scout badge, half small-green-alligator sewn on polo shirts. It's a symbol simultaneously of the crime, the punishment and the confession. We'll let you go, says the little patchwork bundle, but always remember what could have happened. It's another enforcement of rules—but whose?

So it feels impossible for me to not pull together the
persecution of heretics and the hatred of faggots, that is, homosexuals. Some have suggested, I discover, that because homosexuality was a crime punishable by death, homosexuals became known by the same name as the sticks that fed their fires. Burning at the stake was a common method of execution because it showed the criminals the kind of suffering they would soon endure in Hell. And it was surely spectacular, as public executions go. But this theory has been disproved because, at least in England where most of the burning of heretics took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the period when “faggot” referred to those burning bundles, homosexuals weren't executed at the stake, they were usually hanged.

But I'm just not satisfied with the coincidence that one word has so many violent connotations over several centuries without any connections. Especially when I can string them together, however naively. “Faggot” is the bundle (noun), the burning of the bundle (verb), setting a heretic upon the bundle and the burning of the heretic (verbs); it's the small cloth picture of the bundle as a sign of recantation and the recantation itself; it's the action of bundling together sticks, or iron bars, or hands and feet, or people—all being tied down and into place, which makes me think again of those tidy categories, and of power, specifically the misuse of it. And the little patch of the faggot worn on the sleeve makes me think of the pink triangle patches worn on the shoulders of homosexuals when the Nazis shipped them off to camps. Which makes me think again of persecution,
heretics, and witches; of witches, mostly women, burned at the stake, and of
faggot
as a term of abuse for women. Persecution of homosexuals, of being hanged. Is it gratuitous, then, to see the noose wrapping around the neck as a kind of bundling? Because later in the dictionary, under “fag,” I find from the fifteenth century, this definition: “a ‘knot' in cloth.”