Faggot

The harshest English slur for a gay man, especially an effeminate one; shortened to fag, and reclaimed by some gay men among themselves.

Faggot is the heavyweight slur for a gay man, the one shouted from cars, scrawled on walls, and spat during beatings. In general use it covers any gay man; in gay mouths it has always pointed more at the effeminate ones, the queens and the nelly boys who could not or would not pass. Its short form is fag, a little lighter, a little more casual, and just as able to draw blood.

It is also a word some of us use about ourselves, with love, with irony, or as a fist in the air. Both things are true at once, and that is the whole story of this word.

Where it comes from

The plain English faggot is a bundle of sticks for the fire, from the Greek phakelos, "a bundle", by way of French and Italian. As an insult it is old: Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it as a general term of abuse in 1591, and for centuries it was mostly thrown at women, especially an old, bad-tempered one, an "old faggot", a burden to carry like a bundle of wood.

The gay meaning is American and arrives in the 20th century. The earliest citation in Green's comes from a 1914 Vocabulary of Criminal Slang: "All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight". By 1919 a witness in an official inquiry was describing "what they might call a faggot party", and in 1922 the magazine Broadway Brevities printed it as a plain threat: "If that faggot starts anything with me I'll lay him out!". Britain caught it later: in 1966 a New Statesman writer complained that the American word was "making advances here over our own more humane 'queer'".

How the bundle of sticks became a gay man, nobody can say for sure. The most likely route, according to the word historian Michael Quinion, is through the old insult for women, sliding from a contemptible woman to an effeminate man. Other guesses, the Yiddish feygele ("little bird"), the British public-school fag, the cigarette, have all been proposed and none has solid evidence behind it.

Taking it back

Gay writers began grabbing the word in the 1970s, right when liberation made it possible to throw an insult back. Larry Mitchell's fairy-tale manifesto The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions came out in 1977 from Calamus Press. A year later Larry Kramer published his novel Faggots, a savage satire of the New York gay scene; critics mostly liked it, but some reviewers were offended by its frank depiction of gay sex. Putting the slur on the cover was the point in both cases.

Today plenty of gay men call each other faggot in private, as a joke, a provocation or an endearment, the way queer and dyke have been taken back. It shows up in queer art, punk, drag and self-mocking group chats.

Where it still hurts

Outside the family, the word has lost none of its edge. GLAAD's media guide lists "fag" and "faggot" among the epithets that should not be used except in a direct quote that reveals the speaker's bias, or when an LGBTQ person uses it about themselves. In 2011 Canada's broadcast standards council ruled that the Dire Straits hit "Money for Nothing", with its line about "that little faggot", breached the human rights clauses of the broadcasters' code, after a single listener complained. In 2020 BBC Radio 1 switched to a version of "Fairytale of New York" without the slur, saying its younger audience did not want derogatory terms for sexuality and gender.

So the rule is the usual one, only stricter. From one of us, said with a wink, it can be affection. From anyone else, it is still the word that comes before the punch.

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