So I'm in Arkansas (lest we forget) and have been, of late, subjected to what seems an endless stream of sexism and homophobia via my voyeuristic over-the-shoulder observation of my roommates' facebook feeds (my roommates themselves are stand-up folks, but many of their facebook friends are not.) So after a particularly nauseating instance in which my roommate dared to post a status implying that calling something "gay" in a derogatory sense was maybe, y'know, homophobic, and was subsequently dogpiled by three or four people vehemently protesting to the contrary, I felt that I needed to write a thing. So I did. Here it is.
To those who think using the words "gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory sense isn't homophobic: hey guess what you're wrong.
Look, I am as aware as anyone, more aware than you are, of the fact that language changes, that words come to have different meanings over time, that language is dynamic and that people who obsess over grammar at the expense of communication are stupid, but let's just take a moment and examine the facts:
Fact 1: The words "gay" and "faggot" come to have derogatory senses only because of the social (and legal!) stigmata associated with homosexuality.
Fact 2: The words "gay" and "faggot" continue to be used, right now, in this country, in a derogatory sense by the people who are responsible for the continuation of these stigmata, i.e., homophobes.
Fact 3: The stigmata associated with homosexuality have real consequences, right now, in this country, from widespread social disapproval, to greatly increased difficulty if not impossibility of adoption, to not being allowed to be with your dying lover, to being continually tormented to the point where you commit suicide. People die because of homophobia, right now, in the United States of America.
I am not making the argument that calling someone a faggot is morally equivalent to killing them. That would be a stupid argument, and it would be stupid to think I am making it. What I am saying is that homophobia is a serious issue, right now, in this country, and it is facile to suggest that derogatory uses of the word "gay" are A-okay because the word's meaning has changed. It hasn't.
To use "gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory sense, is to associate negativity with homosexuality. This is how language works: words mean things. They don't stop meaning things just because you don't mean them (or claim not to mean them). When you say, "that's so gay," or "what a faggot," what you are communicating, whether you intend to or not, is that gays are less: less worthy of respect, less entitled to rights, less human. That is what people will hear, and that is not their fault, because that is what you have communicated.
But okay, maybe using "gay" and "faggot" as slurs, repeatedly, doesn't make you homophobic. (Maybe using "nigger" or "kike" or "spic" doesn't make you racist.) Maybe you have gay friends. (Maybe you just used the same argument Sarah Palin did. Congratulations.) Maybe you don't think people should burn in hell for eternity just because they're gay. (You probably also don't think the Holocaust was a good thing. You don't get a cookie for that either. I'm not impressed by very very basic human decency.) Here's the real reason that you, specifically, are a homophobe:
Your immediate, knee-jerk reaction when someone brings up that your use of "gay" to mean "bad" is homophobic, is not to listen, or to examine yourself for any unrecognized homophobia, or to just stop using two words with hundreds if not thousands of substitutes which, by contrast, do not communicate that certain classes of people are subhuman - no, your immediate reaction is to justify how you are not at fault, and how the fault lies with the people who might be hurt by your thoughtless language.
Here's the moral of the story, the central point I'm trying to get across: if you are some combination of white, male, straight, cisgendered, or Christian, when dealing with people who are some combination of not those things, about those things where you are in the majority or privileged class, your first response must always be, without exception, to shut the fuck up and listen, because you have no idea whatsoever what it is like to be them, what they think, how they feel - whereas everyone knows what Christian white straight cisgendered males think and how they feel because we have entire media networks devoted to delivering us this information. Shut the fuck up and listen, because you have lived all your life in a bubble of privilege, and you aren't even aware that it exists, because no one has ever given you hateful looks because you are holding hands with someone you love, and you don't have a one in three chance of going to prison because your skin is too dark, and you don't have a one in four chance of being raped because you don't have a penis, and your father has never thanked God out loud before dinner that the rest of the family isn't like you. Shut the fuck up and listen - stay shut up and continue to listen. Ask questions to clarify, if you need help understanding - and you do need help understanding. Let no one accuse me of anti-intellectualism; there is a time for rigorous intellectual discourse and argument, but that time is not now, because you have a serious case of straight (or white or male or cisgendered or Christian) privilege, and the only cure is to shut the fuck up and listen, because until you learn how to do that, you will continue to be a homophobe (or a racist or a sexist or a genderist or a creedist), and I will continue to call you what you are: Bigot.
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