Faggy
A School Yard Epithet Reminds Words Can Hurt
by C. Kevin Smith
w. It's a word I hadn't heard or even thought about in
years. Yet there it was, smack in the center of my computer
screen, in an e-mail accidentally sent to my address. The
author of the e-mail had used the word to describe some writing
of mine, a short memoir about the time I spent with an American
poet before he died, in 2000. I had sent a draft of the memoir to
the e-mail'sauthor, who is the poet's literary executor, thinking he
might like to read it. But in a message meant for someone who
shares my first name, the executor complained that my memoir
was "extremely faggy." Once I got over a certain amount of
shock-over reading an e-mail clearly written to someone else,
over being hurled back in an instant to the memory of school
years, when throwaway slang words might be accompanied, less
casually, by physical violence-I found myself pondering the
executor's choice of "faggy." What if someone else, say, a woman,
had written my memoir? Would it still be "faggy"? What if the
executor hadn't known I'm gay? Is it possible for a heterosexual to
write like a "fag"?
The executor's use of the word "faggy" aimed, I suppose, to
equate my memoir's contents and style with my identity as a gay
man, like paper tracings lined up to match the original. Yet I am
struck by how the use of such words identifies those who speak or
write them more than those they are used for, or rather against; as
far as one-word critiques go, "faggy" suggests a lack of exactly
those qualities so vital to reading: imagination, empathy and
insight. Still, I'm not unhappy to have learned of the executor's
opinion. Writers rarely have as direct a connection to the minds of
their readers as this misdirected e-mail provided me; clouds of
R
Recenfly Published:
Fa.. 2002, James W"Ue Review
perception and personality often obscure whatever feedback a
writer is lucky to receive. It's good to be reminded what's out
there.
Though I do not approve of censorship, I admit to disliking the
word "faggy," in part because I don't know what it means. Indeed,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "faggy" does not exist,
though "faggoty," in its modern sense of "pertaining to homosexu­
ality," makes its first published appearance in an interesting,
uniquely American context. "And there is two things in life I don't
understan'," remarks one character in Claude McKay's 1928
novel Home to Harlem. "It is a bulldyking woman and a faggoty
man." It is revealing that these frank words may first have
appeared in the truth-telling literature of the Harlem Renaissance;
perhaps observing and acknowledging real life and real people has
always been more possible from the razor-thin edges of society
and not the comfort zones of its more thickly-minded center.
Other published derivatives of "fag" not yet rooted out by the
OED undoubtedly exist. But while a faggy or faggoty man may be
someone whose deepest nature leads him to love and desire men,
what is a faggy writing style? What vocabulary or what punctua­
tion should one add or eliminate to devise a style that is faggy? In
truth, I may never know, but encountering this potent word did
remind me of the awesome flexibility of American English, which
never ceases to give us language with the power to astonish. And
to sting.
C . KEVIN SM1TH LIVES IN MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA. HE IS CURRENTIY
WORKING ON A NOVEL.
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