Content warning: a gay man is about to seriously consider and talk about the f-slur.
“But that faggot Noah Schnapp still has a job?!”
That’s a gay Twitter user’s reaction to news that Melissa Bererra was fired from the Scream horror film series after comments on the most recent developments in the Israel-Palestine Conflict. For context, Noah Schnapp is also an actor, starring in that 80s nostalgia show I’ve never seen, Stranger Things. Noah is an outspoken Zionist for which he’s received quite a lot of criticism on Twitter and, I assume, on TikTok, but I avoid political TikTok because I can’t imagine it’s anything other than annoying. Noah is also gay, coming out in his own TikTok earlier this year.
So, in the performative anger of social media, algorithms generally driven through rage, in order to critique this decision, Noah himself, and Hollywood at large’s handling of the events following October 7th, a twitter user said, “But that faggot Noah Schnapp still has a job?!” (screenshot again). When accussed of homophobia for using the f-slur, people were quick to point out the poster himself is gay, and, to a degree, we’ve reclaimed that word.
I call bullshit.
In January of this year, around the time Noah Schnapp came out, one of the queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race was doing what we all do on Twitter: venting and explaining our feelings. Unfortunately, Twitter is one of the sites where assholes dwell, and unfortunately a lot of the vocal fans of Drag Race are absolutely brutal to the queens, especially queens of color. One of those fans responded with a read, and this Queen responded, to this random person on the internet, “Yes you ugly little faggot.”
Later in the year, continuing to vent, she called one of the queer judges on the show a “faggot.” She and the judge later made up. (I remember a lot of people on gay twitter absolutely living for the January moment. She dragged that guy (lol get it?). It was fun to watch someone rake an asshole across the coals and tell them the ash on their cheeks is a horrible contour.
But… this wasn’t a read. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t engaging with someone she knows. It was angrily calling someone the f-slur. Which turned out to be a habit for this queen. Much like that original tweet, the defense comes out: but she’s queer. So she gets to. We’re reclaiming that slur and that gives us permission to use it as a slur.
I think there are two parts to this defense applied in both of these cases. 1) These slurs are reclaimed. 2) This person is a baddie.
Reclamation
Let’s talk about the word “queer.”
In recent years, I’ve come around to the word. It’s quicker to say than LGBT. I like it as an umbrella term and as a self-identity marker. I’m a gay man. And I’m queer. I like the old school association with odd, different, almost dream-like in its existence. I map myself onto the strange, distant, and absurd, so queer seems to combine different aspects of myself, even if that’s not what many people mean when they use it.
At the same time, queer is a slur. Or, rather, it can be.
I often stiffen when someone uses queer as a noun rather than an adjective. That’s often when it enters slur territory. A queer. Those queers. I’d say on the scale of slurs, queer is the bitch to faggot’s cunt. Well, to a degree. Both tier one pejoratives have been, to a degree, reclaimed, and both tier two slurs have more socially acceptable uses in Britain. It is interested that bitch holds onto its derogative nature moreso than queer. In that case, I think we’re witnessing, in real time, an attempt to move faggot from tier two to tier one. Queer no longer holds the snappy rudeness it once did. So there’s an absence there, and some people want to fill it.
If you’ve been on the internet in recent years, you’ll probably have noticed a trend among younger LGBT people to use the word queer in a reclaimed way. I mean, look at me. I regularly use the term and don’t even consider the past negative connotations. According to an article in Columbia Journalism Review by Merrill Perlman, queer started being used against us queers in 1914. Perlman says even then it was used without ill intent by some LGBT people. She goes on to talk about a different argument saying Queer Nation was the first instance of queer as a positive self-identification. She sites a Newsweek article from the 90s which says, “By co-opting the word ‘queer,’ QN claims, they have disarmed homophobes.” The article went on and on about them being a radical gay rights group. Calls us gays. Remember when gay was practically a slur? So despite what some people claim, this isn’t a matter of young people running with a word and ignoring its history. I was born in the 90s. Those who were running a queer rights activist group would have at least been 20. So realistically, 40 and up now. We took it from our elders.
Perlman looks at journalistic guidelines on the usage of the word queer. The consensus seemed to be, in 2019, that it was a slur except in usage by those groups and peoples who embrace it. And, in all cases, it is not appropriate when used as a pejorative. If the intent is to use the word queer as a slur, then it’s a slur, regardless of the speaker or its reclamation.
Speaking of journalistic use, NPR published an article by Juliette Roucheleau about the companies own use and evolving understanding of the word queer. After several uses by NPR, listeners wrote in and asked them to not use it since it has been and continues to be used as a slur across the country. NPR, they said, does not get to reclaim a slur. The queer writers for NPR agreed, but that doesn’t mean those reporters do not get to use it. The conclusion the article seems to come to is that language is changing. Queer is being embraced more and more. And yet it deserves to be treated carefully, and those who are offended by its use deserve to be allowed space to make their concerns heard.
I bring that up for three reasons. The first is to give an example of reclamation where a word is leeched of its pejorative nature. Earlier I compared it to bitch. But bitch, even when reclaimed as it has been, still carries its pejorative nature in the majority of its use. Queer does not. Queer has been taken to mean LGBT. Sometimes you see queer people jokingly allude to its slur past. “We’re a bunch of filthy queers,” and stuff like that. Queer, much like gay, is on its way to total reclamation. Interestingly, anecdotally in my own experience, ‘homosexual’ is increasingly taking on some of the negative connotation because it tends to be used by homophobes and especially transphobes as a sort cold medicalization that ends up dehumanizing people. Language shifts in odd and fascinating ways.
The second purpose is to show that queer, despite being a lovely word, is still one to be wielded carefully. There is true trauma attached to that word for many gay people. Straights have and sometimes still use it as a slur. On Twitter, there have been lots of complaints about people complaining about queer. Anger comes out against the people who say “I’m gay, not queer.” Almost as if it’s a moral offense to not identify with a slur in the process of being reclaimed. Because it still holds pejorative power as a slur.
The third is mostly a corollary to the second. It’s clear that using it as a slur is not valid reclamation. It’s using a historic slur… for its historic slurrage.
Now. Let’s talk about faggot.
I saw a 2003 article by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist, titled “The Other F Word.” In it, Zwicky examines the use of faggot and its meaning as a pejorative and as a reclaimed word. He claims faggot has a two-pronged meaning, unlike most curses. A fag is, literally, a gay man. The word also carries an insult, a negative judgement: gross. Lets consider some other curses and pejoratives. Shit - excrement. Cock - penis. Damn - condemn. Asshole - jerk. Bastard - jerk. Bitch - jerk. Then we have slurs. Slurs are double-pronged. Bitch, II - a disagreeable woman. Think about racial slurs. The N-word both means a Black person and carries a heavy negative, historical, violent judgement.
Zwicky says the reclamation of it strips out meaning. It takes the journey of queer and would turn into a simple description. I am a fag would just mean I am a gay man. It can also showcase personal toughness. This word can’t hurt me. It can also be use as a sign of affection between friends or even lovers. The dehumanization of it can also be employed to success in the bedroom when consented to. But what happens if you strip it the other way? When you don’t use it to refer to gay men necessarily but only as an insult, what insult is it? Well, like most homophobia, in my opinion, it’s rooted in misogyny. To call someone a faggot is to call them un-masculine. It’s a harsher way of saying sissy.
Sometimes, it’s used by us queers against each other. And here it means, you are a Bad Gay. You are queer. Incorrect. The reason the straights hate us. The excuse for homophobia. You are deserving of hatred and homophobia and the violence implied behind that word.
I’ve been called a faggot on the street several times by strangers. Neither time felt like a friendly reclamation or a cheeky drag. It was a threat meant to terrify me.
Let’s take that original tweet and see if it’s using a reclaimed version of the f-slur.
Stripping version one. Remove the judgement.
“But that gay man Noah Schnapp still has a job?!” Well, Noah is gay and a man, but that doesn’t make sense as the tweet. His sexuality wouldn’t have anything to do with it. If you have an issue with, say, Pete Buttigieg as Transportation Secretary, and you said, “But that gay man Pete Buttigieg is still in the cabinet?” It sounds like your issue is less with him and more with the fact that he’s gay. At which point, you’re just using the slur.
Stripping version two. Remove the description.
“But that feminine sissy Noah Schnapp still has a job?!” That is unnecessary misogyny.
Okay, how about… Is it Noah using it as a defiant self-identity marker? Well, the tweeter isn’t Noah so that doesn’t apply.
Is it showing affection? Obviously not.
This tweet is not reclamation. It is using a slur as a slur. It is weaponizing homophobia against a queer person. Why? When the drag queen used the slur as a slur, why did she weaponize homophobia? Why use that slur?
As Zwicky would say, it’s because they’re Bad Gays.
The Baddies
The first thing that comes to mind for me when I say the phrase “bad gays” is a play by Joshua Harmon titled Bad Jews. I read it my sophomore year of undergrad in a theater literature course.
While looking to refresh myself on the play, I came across a book review in the Washington Post by Jane Eisner about a book titled Bad Jews. In her review, Eisner recalls an incident in which she was first made to feel like a “bad Jew” by a relative for a religious practice her grandmother disagreed with. In the review, Eisner alludes to Jewishness as being, at least in secular America, a sort of social construction where the rules of who is and isn’t included are often fought over lines both out of love and out of vitriol. It seems, in her opinion, the title traps the book. When looking for the “bad Jew,” the real goal is often less to exclude others from Jewishness but moreso to make sure they are a Good Jew.
In an episode of NPR’s Code Swtich, co-host Karen Grigsby Bates interviews Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy about the N-word. Kennedy asserts that he only really cares when the word is used as a slur. He then relates later on in the interview about how often the word was used in his home growing up, sometimes in a fun reclamation way. Sometimes, though, his dad would use it as a slur. “An Uncle Tom N-.-.-.-.-.” A Black man uses that word as a slur when he’s determined that someone is a Bad Black.
That’s what is at play when Zwicky talks about Bad Gays. I found myself reliving an embarrassing part of my youth reading those last few paragraphs of his article. I went to high school in small town Kentucky. I came out to the majority of my friends sophomore year and to the rest of my grade the next year in an English class. There weren’t many out gay guys and those I knew were loud or girly or just generally got on my nerves in some way. When the friends of friends were with me and asked about it with a laugh, I would willingly and readily say that I’m not a faggot like those guys. They were Bad Gays. In this case, that meant flamboyant. Insufficiently calm and masculine. In this, I was being both homophobic and sexist, partially to express annoyance, partially to entertain those laughing dudes, and mostly to distinguish myself. I am not like them. If a homophobic slur was going to be used, they were the ones who deserved it, not me.
You often see this pick-me type of self-preservation bigotry in conservative queer people. In the play Angels in America, Roy Cohn, conservative lawyer and Trump mentor, insists that he is not gay. He has sex with men. He wants sex with men. He’s only attracted to men. But he is not gay. Gay is the word for those political brats, the annoying democratic masses advocating for things, the ones who deserved violence and hate and slurs. He’s a homophobe, that’s easy to say. But it’s important to remember Cohn worked with Sen. McCarthy. Together they led the Scares Red and Lavender, bisexual lighting. Cohn likely could never identify as gay because, for him, that word was anti-American. He used it to destroy lives and saw it work. Gay, for him, was a slur, and those pesky queers deserved it. He did not.
ContraPoints goes into this too on her video “Cringe.” In it, she talks about the instinct amongst trans people to distinguish themselves from the “bad transgenders.” Because when you see someone of your identity do something “cringe” and experience self-cringe, self-hate, we have an instinctual need to distance ourselves. Several of the conservative trans YouTubers Natalie talks about employ transphobia against the people that annoy them. They use slurs. ‘These are the bad transes, and the bad transes deserve the slurs. They deserve the bigotry. Not I. Focus your hate here.’
When that drag queen replied to a man calling him a faggot, wherein she was not calling him a gay man or employing comedic closeness, she was simply using a slur as a slur. Because he was an asshole. And assholes deserve what they get.
In the many replies to that tweet about Noah Schnapp that inspired this video, the ones who moved beyond “but OP is gay though so it’s fine” and dealt with the actual usage of it as a slur, they claimed it was fine to use slurs against Noah. Noah, afterall, is a Bad Gay. Bad Gays deserve the abuse they get. The price he pays for his Zionism is to hand over his dignity. His humanity. “We do not extend to you the belief you are human,” they say implicitly. “You deserve to be dehumanized and abused.”
And that’s why that Tweeter called Noah a fag in the first place. He wanted to use a slur against Noah, to weaponize homophobia against him. Because Noah is a Bad Gay, and OP is a Good Gay. In being a Good Gay, he has to point to the Bad Gay and say, “That is a faggot.” And supposedly progressive people laughed. They liked the tweet. They agreed with it.
I’ve talked about it before and will again, but the problem is that there are people for whom politics is not a matter of wanting to better the world. It’s about wanting to punish the Bad Guys. These people deserve violence. These people deserve abuse. We will keep the death penalty after the glorious revolution because bad guys deserve the wall. These people do not care about the politics they espouse. They care about holding the gun. They want to be the boot.
If you venture into the mentions of Will Stancil on Twitter, you’ll find a bunch of leftists who call him a neoliberal moron espousing the need for compassion for the less fortunate, for those injured by the economy, by Israel, by the US. Then they tell him to go kill himself. He deserves to be murdered… for the crime of disagreeing with them. He is a Bad Progressive. They are the Good Progressives. So they have to lob abuse at him to distinguish that he is different. He deserves abuse. They do not.
The internet loves this sort of shit. Take a look at Sarah Z’s “The Panopticon of West Elm Caleb” or ContaPoints’s “Cancelling.” The internet is obsessed with finding Bad Guys and laughing in joy at the abuse thrown their way. Bloodlust is the current zeitgeist.
During the 2020 primaries, the supposed leftist teenage Weekend at Bernies campaign for Mike Gravel pushed out the former senator to say that then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg was running only on his being gay and that queer people supported him only because of that point. It harkened back to those “Obama only won because he’s Black,” nonsense. Buttigieg was one of the more policy centric campaigns at the time, agree with him or not. That statement was pure homophobia. But because he disagreed with Pete politically, it meant Pete was a Bad Gay and deserving of the homophobia.
Let’s talk Lindsey Graham. The Senator from South Carolina is a bit effeminate. He’s weird. He’s a homophobic conservative asshole who kisses Trump’s mushroom all the time. In 2020, people claimed Graham is known by male sex workers as “Lady G.” The internet took this and exploded. His mentions were flooded with it. Supposed liberals rushed to use the name against him. They defended this by saying that Graham is a homophobe, and he deserves the abuse. He is a Bad Gay, though there’s been no confrimation on his sexuality. But let’s take a step back. Lady G. We’re associating homosexuality with feminity, with being incorrectly gendered. To be gay is to be a woman, and we all know that’s wrong. Again, I say, homophobia is an offshoot of sexism. By using his potential sexuality as a way to attack his maleness, the commentators were basically calling him a faggot.
We all remember the constant fat jokes at the expense of Donald Trump. And because he’s a Bad Fat, he deserves to have his fatness used against him as a moral category.
When Queen Elizabeth died, you had an outpouring of people sincerely wishing she burned in hell and was tortured for all eternity. Because she was a Bad Person she deserves constant, continuous inhumane treatment.
The constant here is that there are certain people who will only grant you humanness if you happen to agree with them. Once you step out of line, once they have determined you are Bad, then you deserve all injustices rained upon you. They are the granters of humanity. And they are gleefully on the search for those they can remove blood from. After you have been dried, they can parade your corpse. And in the parading they can say that they are the Good.
So What?
When you use the word faggot as a slur against the Bad Gays, you are saying homophobia is valid. You are wishing to stab your opponent with it. You are longing for blood. The solution here is simple: We can no longer tolerate this sort of behavoir. Mean Girl activism, the idea that the best way to improve the world is to be as cruel as possible in arguing for our wants, is idiotic nonsense. It doesn’t work. It alienates sane people who can engage their empathy. But it does sate the need to hurt others. It alleviates the shame that comes with wanting to inflict pain. These are the Bad Guys. And the Bad Guys are monsters, not humans, so I can harm them. I can abuse them. I can kill them and laugh about it, and thousands will laugh with me.
“You’re a pussy,” is often posted under people who complain about death threats. “Log off and grow up.” The implication is that those wishes of harm are morally neutral or maybe even correct, and you getting hurt by them? That’s your fault. If you were a Good Person, they would grant you humanity. If you were a Good Person, you wouldn’t be abused.
This is an embrace of abuser logic. Full stop.
The original tweet and its defenders are clearly saying to Noah Schnapp, “You are a Bad Gay. You deserve harm. You deserve the homophobia that haunted and killed our community for generations. If only you were a Good Gay, then you wouldn’t deserve this.”
Using a slur as a slur means you’re being cruel. You’re being an asshole. You’re being a bigot. It doesn’t matter what your identity is. And there is no place for bigotry in the future we want to build. If your politic is not built off compassion, then you deserve no power. You deserve no victory. You deserve someone to love you until you finally figure out how to grow up and throw away your incessant bloodlust.
None of us determines who is human. None of us are deserving of pain. Suffering is not good. It is not holy. It never has been and never will be.
Your bloodlust is bad. Stop feeding it.
As for what to do? It’s long past time we close our doors on this behavior. Call it out. Ignore it. Don’t participate. Block people. Tell them their bigotry and hatred does not have a place in our movement, and they ought to work on themselves if they want to rejoin us in creating a better world.
And I bet many of them will drop politics like a heavy stone. Because they’re just in it to get points for being cruel. That’s all they care about. They don’t want a better world. They don’t want to convince people. They don’t want to advocate or vote or protest or rally. They want to hate. And they want to be told they’re special good boys for hating. Politics for them has nothing to do with bettering the world. It starts and ends at slurring the baddies.
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