Artist's Statement
Awhile ago I had a conversation with
Ruben Bolling, author of “Tom the Dancing Bug,” about
the politics and propriety of using racial or sexual
epithets in one’s work, even if it is in
vox personæ (that is, in the mouth of a
character from whom such language would be appropriate
and expected). Ruben, after humbling experience, has
come around to the conclusion that it’s never
okay to use such words—they’re just too
fraught with hatred and a history of inflicting harm.
Whereas I, perhaps less wisely, continue to follow
John Waters’ challenge
to the next generation of humorists to find a way to
be un-p.c. without being a jerk about it. This cartoon
representsnot only my formal coming-out as a big fag
but my effort to reclaim the word fag from
the homophobic bigots, dissociate it from any overt
reference to sexual orientation, and reappropriate
it as a puerile, middle-school insult. Of course homosexuals
are allowed to call each other faggot harmlessly,
just as blacks get to say nigger with a kind
of defiant casualness which bothers no one except for
everybody around them and maybe each other deep inside.
But I'd like to rehabilitate faggy to designate
things that are not literally homosexual but are nonetheless
undeniably faggy, things like V-neck sweaters and Yanni
and Dr. Smith on Lost in Space. (Okay maybe
Dr. Smith is a borderline case but come on, it's a
kids' show, nobody has any real sexuality, except for
that little minx Penny.) Maybe it would help to desaturate
the word of its vicious power to broaden and dilute
its meaning this way--just as the word jerk now
just means someone insensitive, obnoxious, and stupid
and no longer specifically refers to compulsive masturbators.
Alas, there just don’t seem to be any epithets
with any real juice at all that don’t have their
etymological origins in some cruel and wounding term
that targets a very specific group: even the now fairly
bland idiot once had a very specific medical meaning
and was used, in less enlightened times, to mock the
mentally disabled or ill.
I realize people are touchy about this
sort of thing, and not without just cause. I once permanently
alienated someone, a gay friend of a friend, merely
by mentioning the existence of the playground game “Smear
the Queer,” (a.k.a., in some regional variants,
the more self-explanatory “Kill the Guy With
the Ball”). It’s not like I personally
invented this game or named it myself. But by simply
repeating its name I earned his undying antipathy.
And yet, as a pale skinny kid who read books and didn’t
play sports or go out with girls in high school, and,
later, a guy who hung out in dive bars in Cecil County
but talked like a college boy, I got called gay and faggot growing
up as much as any bona fide homosexual. One thing I
like about living in New York City is that nobody ever
calls you faggot, maybe because people are too grown-up
and cosmopolitan here, or because this is the place
where all the people who got called faggot in their
hometowns fled to, or maybe just because there are
so many authentic faggots here for contrast that nobody
mistakes you for one just because you’re wearing
a blazer.
One of the very few bits of dumb gender
bullshit that, as far as I know, women don’t
have to contend with that men do is this question of
being a “real” man. I don't know--do women
ever worry about being a "real" woman? Perhaps
there is some whatever's-the-female-equivalent-of-machismo surrounding
issues of childbirth and motherhood, but I don’t
think the whole issue of your gender identity feels
as tenuously insecure for women as it does for men.
I remember when I was a kid a (not very bright) friend
of mine told me not to sit with my legs crossed, because
men didn’t sit like that. I remember thinking, my
dad sits like that, but I also uncrossed my legs.
(This was the same kid who instructed me that toilet was
pronounced terlet.) This kind of unspoken
but harshly enforced code continued through adolescence:
the clothes you wore, the music you listened to, etc.,
all were subject to this constant thhreat of being
deemed girly or gay. And of course this sort of anxiety
is a useful marketing tool among adolescents, so the
culture tends to cultivate it. Some of these rules
verged on superstitions of the Babylonian dog-on-the-bed
variety. Boys, you'll remember, could not carry their
books clasped to their chests--they had to lug them
all under one arm, no matter how large or unweildy
a stack they had. (But then why would a real guy have so
many books, anyway?) If you wore an earring
in your right ear it meant you were gay. If you wore
green on a certain day of the week (was it Friday?)
you were gay.
This fearful
cringing bullshit doesn’t even end in adulthood.
Until a year or two ago I had a friend who was always
presuming to mentor me in what “a real man” wears
(fitted shit, sportscoats), owns (expensive cell phones),
and does (feels girls up in the street instead of timidly
asking them out). On especially frigid days I wear
a raccoon coat around town, one that would’ve
been the cat’s meow in fashion eighty years ago,
and is fucking awesome, but now, in 2009, because I
am neither a.) female or b.) black, often gets laughed
at. (You watch: two years from now they’ll be
in fashion again, thanks to me, and the same douchebags
who made snarky ironic remarks about my coat will be
paying $3000 for them in vintage stores.) A lot of
grown men seem to experience an almost hysterical fear
of ever being perceived as anything other than a 100%
normal, straight, red-blooded American male, a condition
which is imaginary and therefore impossible to wholly
achieve, which doubtless leaves a lot of them feeling
anxious and fraudulent and in constant danger of being
found out as only 87% manly. Hence homphobia.
And anything we feel anxiety about is
a going to be a focus of humor. (I love the “You
know how I know you’re gay?” routine in The
40-Year-Old Virgin.) So it’s handy to have
a word so overtly puerile and middle-schoolish to mock
a.) your friends’ habits and affectations and
also, on a more self-conscious “meta-” level,
b.) your own obnoxious presumption in judging them
and c.) the whole notion of some rigid, objective standard
of what is manly and normal vs. what is unacceptably
faggy or gay.
I don’t know--maybe, my years
of being called gay on the playground and general fagginess
notwithstanding, I still lack what David Foster Wallace
called the “rhetorical authority” to make
this argument, since I am after all a pretty flamboyant,
even flaming, heterosexual. I am certainly way more
hesitant to reappropriate and comedically deploy epithets
to which I have no conceivable claim. My late friend
John always forbade his friends from using the word retard in
his presence, because John had had a sister with Down’s
Syndrome. And because John was the kind of thoroughly
gentle and decent guy who, if you made him angry, you
knew it was not because he was being touchy and oversensitive
but because you must be an asshole, we knocked it off.
Even though retard also has some of the overtly
stupid, vulgar whiff of middle-school that makes fag so
embarassingly fun to say. I have seen it used to humorous
effect (most recently in the legend to The Onion’s “Our
Dumb World” atlas, in which the symbol of a ship
was accompanied by the explanation: “It’s
a ship, you fucking retard”), but I still avoid
it myself. I’m currently reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree,
set in Knoxville in 1951 among the very lowest substratum
of society, and it would be a blatant bowdlerization
or distractingly anachronistic, like some weird parallel-universe
child’s version of that time and place, if no
one in it were to use the word nigger. So
they do, pretty often, which is only naturalistic in
that book, just as it is in Huck Finn. But
this doesn’t stop me from worrying that some
black person might notice it on the page over my shoulder
on the subway.
So, yes, it is possible that I have
failed here and am just a jerk (in the broad generic
sense) after all. I await the angry letters-to-the-editor.
Thanks to my friends Tom and Jesse for
the inspiration RE Sharks vs. Jets. (I actually did
have to ask some strangers in the café where
I was drawing who was playing in the Superbowl this
year.) And thanks to Jesse for suggesting that the
final damning proof of my faggotry should be liking
girls, a la The Simpsons’ line: "You’re
kissing a girl—that’s so gay!” As
Jules Feiffer points out in his essay on comic book
heroes, “In our society it is not only homosexuals
who don’t like women. Almost no one does.” The
same friend who used to tell me what real men did and
did not do also used to berate me for wasting my time
hanging around with women he didn’t think were
attractive. Life was pretty much binary for him: every
event that did not conclude with fucking a hot girl
was, to him, just another disappointing failure. He
was no idiot, and he certainly wasn’t faggy;
he was just a jerk.
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