“FUCKING FAGGOT!”

As I was walking down the street, as weird and gangly as on usual days, I heard a familiar call come from a car that was passing by me at about thirty miles an hour. I wish that I could say that it was unusual to hear what I heard, but that would be a lie, but it would also be a lie to say that even half of my days have not exposed me to this phenomenon of male insecurity.

The words that were said were: “FUCKING FAGGOT!”.

Even before I had my first flood of hormones or figured out the joys of masturbation I was already learning to cower inside of myself from this particular breed of hostility.

In fact, by the time that I started to develop in the sexual way I had already been thoroughly and exhaustingly trained to hate men. My first father had abandoned me and my mother and my next swore at me and occasionally hit me (probably because he himself suspected that I was one of these “fucking faggots”) and the hillbilly tractor boys would beat me with my own shoes while chanting this now familiar terminology which they had also learned before the blooming of their own sexual identities. But I will not launch off into some long winded and unnecessary self-defense, trying to assure you, the reader, that these accusations are inaccurate. To make any explanations now would be degrading in the fullest for both of us.

What I wish to do here is find out why. I want to talk it out.

I’ve always been an “odd duck” if you will, and if you know me I’m sure that you will. From the beginning my dear mother had assured me that I only received this kind of verbal assault because I was unusual, because there was something inside of me which was unlike what was inside of these other boys, and that they were jealous. I never believed her when she said that they were jealous, but I did very much believe that their classification of me was the path of least resistance towards putting me in some box that they could understand.

Even as I made my first lunch time announcements that I was going to join the military, my only hope to prove myself to these boys (which at the time I had desperately hoped to do) I was me with the skepticism of the shit kickers. One of them said: “They don’t let faggots in the military.”

Well, instead of making an unquestionable man out of me, my six years in the military were speckled as heavily with these slurs as space is with stars. I became to know myself as “FAGGOT” and to respond as if it were written on my name tape.

It was during this time that I realized the true nature of this hatred.

They weren’t jealous of my internal beauty. They wanted to fuck me and they hated themselves for it.

Why else would they spend so much time fretting over who it was that I chose to fuck. Certainly they had nothing to worry about. They were mostly fat and smelled always of farts and whiskey. They touched each other frequently, enjoyed watching pornography in large circles of other men, talked almost exclusively of other men as homosexuals and women as “sluts” and “whores” to be fucked (or so often raped) violently and without joy. Of course I would not want, in even the most deprived of landscapes, to ever touch one of these men with anything other than a knife. They disgusted me.

Despite all of my attempts to convince them that I enjoyed the company of women and that I had never even met a man that I could tolerate, much less enjoy the prospect of loving, I stayed in my little easy box. They made jokes about putting me in a dress and gang raping me. One of them pinned me to my bed in an attempt to actually carry through with the act. Even amongst my “friends” I still found myself answering for this perceived “disorder”.

And even now, at the age of 27, I still hear the word regularly. I can read it on the faces of my peers and passerbys alike. Even a few of my ex-girlfriends who had become more like men than women in their fear and deep seated need to please manly men had used the same term for the same reasons that boys had. To put me under them because they were afraid of me.

I have often wished that my life were as simple as to be a homosexual. To be what they say that I am so that when they say their stupid words I could have the anger of the victim and not the questions about what it is in me that causes such disgust and revulsion amongst most men, even those that think they are “over it”.

It is the way that I walk and the way that I talk. But what gives them the right? Nothing. Just their own anger and their frustrations, and, as I am led to guess, their repressed desire to share something with another man through the hateful barrier that they can only cross when they are playing homoerotic games with each other, or preening over sexual conquests with other men, finally feeling the joy that they missed while having their sex.

This analysis isn’t going to get me anywhere. It hasn’t for years. I only want to confront it. I am sick of being a quiet victim who carries inside of himself all of these questions. I am sick of choking back the anger when I hear these words. I am sick of the violence that wells up inside of me when I know that these hateful rapists cover the nation from sea to shining sea sewing future harvests of likewise tormented young men and women who live in fear of the uncontrollable hate of men who hate themselves and what they secretly think about when they are playing their boy’s games.

So I am a FAGGOT, and I’m proud of it. Not because of who I choose to love and to touch and to endure time with, but because it has been my name and it has been my calling for 27 years and I am proud to share it with everyone else who has known its violence.

If this is your name too then be proud. There is no greater height to attain as a male than to be opposite “them” in their own spectrum. Be who you are. Own it. The strangeness that they attempt to classify is just awesomeness waiting to make you into something more than them, and they are sad that they weren’t something more themselves.