An Enchantment of Language

For a long time, I did not have a body. A kind of enchantment, and not the good kind!, had draped the body I should have had—let's call it the faggot-body for short—draped it in a stereotype-of-sorts, namely, that a person can stop being a faggot if he can stop having a body: Body = faggot.Mind = not-faggot.Mind = language.Silence = faggot! ( = death).It was a kind of enchantment of language. Talked my way out of anything—even my body! Anticipated every attack—neutralized it with words! Spun a story! Told a joke! Was entertaining or smart; or seemed to be entertaining or seemed to be smart.You may have noticed that I use exclamation points more than you might think is wise. Certainly, I use them more than I used to use them. I used to think that language itself should communicate feeling, that if my language were not sufficient to this task, then no amount of punctuating punctuation would remediate this failure. Now I realize that the exclamation point, in this essay in particular, is a part of my personality. It's a bit embarrassing to discover this, more so to admit it. But I am trying to be truthful here. I realize that in the past, I might have sought to repress this punctification! Sought to suppress the voice you are hearing now that rises up in a sort of swaying, swirling ebullience! Sought to subdue this ebullience in service to a meaning that I had judged to be beyond myself but still central to what I was writing about. The point being that my self was beside the point. At least, that is what I had thought.It's necessary for writers to pitch their voices in a way that serves both their material and their spirits, and yet, serving one might sacrifice the other. Every sentence demands such a calculation. It has become very important to me now to not get beyond my self, to not find my self flying over the handlebars of my spirit as my language takes on speed. And one of the parts of my self that, like my body, my mind routinely accelerates beyond is my “natural” sense of wonder, a sense of wonder that clothes itself or clothes my self, in ebullience, a sense of wonder that is, in a sense, unclothed.It seems strange that my unclothed self, which I might infer is my most vulnerable self, is in fact the one self best equipped to protect all my other selves from danger. And I cannot say for certain, but I wonder if all of us deep down inside are most ourselves when most ebullient. If the Artist Formerly Known As Prince chose that symbol as a name—no key for it on my keyboard—a name that no spoken language can express without compromising some measure of the name's precision, perhaps I might accept, for now, simply this symbol — ! —as the representation of my most-self, a representation that similarly cannot be expressed out loud by saying “space–12-point exclamation point–space.” So when you see the exclamation point here, read it as “Rob,” as ebullience, maybe as “faggot”—but in a good way, because Faggot!, it turns out, is very very good—maybe, too, as the innocent, the naive, the wonderstruck, the hopeful, the foolish, the swaying, the swirling, the fey—all those things that in their ebullience refuse to accept some societal judgment that would condemn them, thereby and maybe-unintentionally-but-maybe-intentionally condemning the aggregation of traits, quirks, desires, the aggregation of selves, that goes by the name “Rob,” but only because no other shorthand will do—except maybe, now, finally: ! .Language was my first survival skill. Whether it derived from my discovery that I have a faggot-body that needed protection—via camouflage or disappearance, both methods seemed to work—I don't know. But I could talk my way out of anything. Talked myself out of a body. Breathing, eating, and sleeping, childRob called all those functions optional. He willed them under his conscious, mindful, wordful control. The faggot-body—well, any body really!—he hid from himself, conspiring with his mind to present a fiction of self: all words, no action.Growing up in my family, silence was my first language (disguised sometimes as chatter). Growing up in the United States, English was my second language (the language of enchantment—and not in a good way). Growing up my French-born mother's son (fils), not-French was my third language (French being the lingua of secrets—from me; not-French being the lingua of pretense—for me). Growing up in New York, sarcasm was my fourth language. Sarcasm—always good for a laugh—protected the faggot-body, le corps du petit pédé. Having grown up, my body has become my fifth language, after, for the longest time, surviving as a dead language, a language spoken only in sign, written only in lemon juice. Leaping ahead, I will reveal that ! speaks only ebullience, requiring neither idiom nor metaphor nor barely ever an adjective or adverb. ! requires no linguistic protection; ! requires no protection at all. I guess I should define the word “faggot.” Maybe that will help those of you who are having trouble suspending disbelief, discomfort, distaste? Unless you are yourself a faggot. In which case you can skip this paragraph. You know what I mean. Or maybe you don't? All right, maybe all readers—faggot or not—should continue reading here, since none of you is me.When I say the word “Faggot!”—capital F, exclamation point—it's either a whisper, audible only to myself, an ode to the joy that this dancing faggot-body felt upon coming out, or a shout, into my pillow, a whack delivered like a wad of spit. The spit, in this case, was the sensoramic adjunct to the expletive “faggot,” which was hurled at me 40 years ago in San Francisco. It was after I exited the 49 Van Ness bus at Market Street on my way home from my waiter shift at Peppino's Italian Restaurant on Polk and Sutter late one evening, maybe around midnight, as the spitter sat back-of-the-bus waiting for my faggot-body to exit beneath his contempt. He knew a faggot when he saw one. No getting out of this body of mine, this way of moving, of being—even dressed in waiter-anonymous black-and-white.I should have walked. When I walk nighttime streets—which I learned to do when I'd travel Manhattan with high school friends, eventually making it home to Queens by my 2:00 a.m. curfew—when I walk nighttime streets, I manage to do it without a faggot-body. It's a skill that I can't explain. Walk straight? Walk invisible? Walk pretense? By the time of the bus ride, the skill of walking without my body had so colonized my being that although I had recognized my fear (of others; of myself), I hadn't realized how much exertion was required to pull all that faggotness inside and to hate it, stealthily so I almost would not notice the faggotness crouching there in a corner of my psyche, almost would not recognize the hate I'd erected around it. Remember on Star Trek, the cloaking shield? It made the starship invisible. But it commanded a lot of the ship's energy, so the Enterprise could sustain cloaking for only so long. Plus Ensign Chekov could not fire the ship's weapons or get the ship to do much else while the Enterprise was cloaked. That's how it was for me. I cloaked my faggot-body in plain sight, wrapped it in self-hate, choosing invisibility over defiance.I'm talking here just about nighttime walking, but I queer-camouflaged myself all my daytime hours too. Even the hours when I worked as an out gay man at an LGBTQ+ mental health agency, I shrouded my faggot-body in repudiation: no amount of “coming out” could force me to uncloak.All of which is to say that had I not already known that “faggot” is a derogatory term for a “homosexual man,” I would have learned it—no reading required!—as my fellow bus passenger's derision dripped down my face. But by that time, even though I did not have the body I deserved, I had enough of a body to know, finally, that I was a faggot, that I deserved the epithet. The reading that I might have required, by the way, can be found in the Online Etymology Dictionary. Note, in particular, that the commonly ascribed synonymity of the imprecation “faggot” with a word to connote the bundle of sticks used to burn heretics in sixteenth-century England is a “an etymological urban legend”:“Burning sometimes was a punishment meted out to homosexuals in Christian Europe (on the suggestion of the Biblical fate of Sodom and Gomorrah), but in England, where parliament had made homosexuality a capital offense in 1533, hanging was the method prescribed.”Well, thank God for that!The use of “faggot” to describe a “male homosexual” is much more recent than sixteenth-century England: 1914 in the United States. It derives from a different sort of bundle of sticks, from the 1590s: “a woman, especially an old and unpleasant one . . . as something awkward that has to be carried.” It is an unexpected tribute to the metaphorical power of a “bundle of sticks” that it spawns two completely different derogations—for heretics and women—that, only in America!, becomes “faggot,” a slam for queer men. And in a strange collision of my identities, the Online Etymology Dictionary adds that the awkward-bundle origin of “faggot” might have been “reinforced by the Yiddish faygele, ‘homosexual’ (n.), meaning literally ‘little bird.’” It's at moments like these that my respect for intersectionality theory expands: all the parts of me attack all the other parts, as if each were begging membership in American society by proving itself (that is, myself) capable of meting out the oppressive violence that holds said society together. It's a sort of hazing that I assure you I passed. If only the spitter had known; maybe he'd have been kinder to a kindred soul. Maybe he'd have realized that no amount of spit from him could compare to the amount I'd already disposed upon myself. To be fair, American society is no worse than most, although in the United States, it is easier to get shot for your transgressions than in other places, where you might just have to settle for hanging or burning. I've thought about the spitter for years, always asking myself, “Precisely how visible, after all that hiding, was, is, the faggot in me?” I was not one of those gay boys who knew he was queer from toddlerhood, who, no matter the consequences, allows himself to be his gayself. I was one of those queer boys who fights his faggotness so that he can believe he is a something not-gay, which turns out to be a nothing, because, after all, he is gay! The Oxford English Dictionary adds in its recitation for the word “faggot” a special flavor of effemininity that the Online Etymology Dictionary omits: the tang of faggotness—which is mine—cooked into the word “sissy.” It might be that the faggot-thing I am hiding most is that little fairy. It might be that no amount of hiding ever works.Sad truth: everyone knew but me. No one was surprised when I came out, which somehow made the coming out worse. It was as if upon seeing my faggotness again and again all those years, they had nonetheless pretended they had noticed nothing at all. All those years I had spent without a body, there had been a body (and wings!) that everyone could see—even if it was a body that I could not feel. A body they could see but which they would not say they saw. The spitter saw—not merely the faggot but especially the fairy, the little bird—and he, for one, would tell. Now I know how the Emperor felt.After the spit hit my face, after I recovered from the paralysis of horror and terror, I crossed the deserted street to wait, still shaking, for the 7 Haight bus back to my flat. My housemates were already asleep, so I cried alone. And still, I found in myself the capacity to shove the horror and terror back down into some primordial silent place, the place where I'd thought I'd hidden my gayness. The irony is that by then, I was Out! and, at least on paper, I absolutely believed that I had an obligation to make my outness visible. So all that shoving back into invisibility was accompanied by guilt. Jewish guilt? Dancing upon faggot shame?It reminds me of one of the stories my mother—born and raised in Nice, France, by Sephardic parents from outside Istanbul—recounted in her short unpublished memoir, which included details from the Nazi occupation that eventually drove the family into hiding:“My father has a prominent Semitic nose. Whenever he sees Germans approaching him in the street, he feigns blowing his nose so he can hide it in his handkerchief.”The spitter covered his fear with rage, because I must have forgotten to cover my gayness with my grandfather's caution. It was not the first time I'd been “faggoted”: at day camp, L. “faggoted” me through a summer; in ninth grade, S., the toughest guy in our class, “faggoted” me until graduation; in high school, W. and D., one or the other, “faggoted” me under his breath whenever he passed me in the hallway; in college, the frat boys along the Walk crowed “faggot!” any time an alcohol binge fueled an exuberant exercise of power. (I still haven't figured out which was more terrifying: the frat boy's faggot-yell, whose volume almost drowned out its vitriol, or W.’s faggot-whisper, so soft as to slip into the tiniest crack in my straight-pretense, where “faggot” festered for a moment before its poison paralyzed my body.) I survived it all by being small enough—beneath the level of detection—or fast enough—out of sight—or witty enough—out of mind. About 20 years later, I happened to face someone looking back at me from the bank of shower stalls on the other side of the tiled space of my gym locker room. I just caught his glance, or he mine, nothing more than that. His top-of-the-lungs “faggot!” preceded a cackle shared by his friend in the next stall. I must have forgotten to cover my eyes. I cried that night too, the tension finally draining away, as if to clean my self out with the salt of recognition. Given this long history of faggression, how could I “reclaim” the word? According to philosopher Kameron Johnston St. Clare, “hate speech” is governed by linguistic convention, not by standard definition, and it is convention that transforms into a “slur” a word that means one or many things. Because such conventions are so powerful, any act of reclaiming the slur—that is, redefining the derogation as affirmation so that I might wrest its power from those who would deploy it—faces the daunting task of developing a new convention that must coexist with the old derogation: an affirmation rather than a slur. As both process and product, reclaiming is fraught and confused, oversimplified and controversial—that is, it is always open to misunderstanding. Exhibit 1? Your disbelief, discomfort, at my at the of my new I were to say that the “faggot” I when I the word here is both the spit and the I'd be to its power to of it as like a one moment the one moment the bundle of sticks only for or or the next moment the bundle of and perhaps all the more for to before it. And I can't that I And I that the of is to for the power of “faggot” to me. is no if the is always as as is an an in which the word has me It's a power of this itself not only when I its as it from the of a but even more were I to in the as it from a for then, is my am not I can express how central this has If to hide something about myself is to be especially in then to something is to be I have hidden almost to that the merely almost of to be is to say to the that I to even what an other me to For I will no my body for a that would be to this I will that my no one, not even my self, as a am I were to say that the way I use is how some use the that might make it to But in the way you might Even though there is an for some the power of the in to my if that might what I is that the is just like the because just as I can't know how the to a person who its you can't know how the to especially if you are not an And perhaps even if you is, the is not to the to the its is a for my it is just the I to my body, to get my body after all this with “faggot,” with All right, not completely am be not of the But if can't see me as Faggot!, see me as the in that exclamation point then my body will only a hanging in To I was with a body. a the must have his to that place that boys the the as that moment when a a a linguistic that both an and it. In this case, the is the who by or not only the body that the that itself upon the being but in that moment of the as a Because before the is or the is always only a or a is an And being is by as all but or at least, was writing before it was to the of the in the would have already the to the as already a some might even that the of as the moment of might the to the But my is that even in under the of an little or would become a not with the of their but with the of little or its invisibility in the point I was when I was and along with my with a then it along with my In its place was a mind that to be my body in the boy's to a boy's called itself a as I now call myself a But as much as I the that myself as I could not them. It would have all been I if my act had been a and that, in would have been my My body would have with its mind in a that could only be as it to that since then, I have been trying to find my in my still the on even though being called as as an It's not that I or was, My self with his societal My I have to have just as It's that my seems beside my point. And even if should have nothing to do with who I most that is, who in me should be most by my and of the my than