“What's a faggot?” I should warn that this post expresses a particular position about people. The question, posed by my six-year-old son, has got me thinking. Recently, he has learned two things, one I knew as a child, and one that I didn't. First he learned from a newly found obsession with The Pogues the wonderful, terrible taste of bad words in your mouth. As parents my wife and I try to take a realistic approach: these words are there, be careful, you shouldn't use them because they will get you in trouble, and they can hurt people, and you don't want to do that because you are a kind little boy. But he knows exactly what we forget, which is that all these words – the F bomb, C U next Tuesday, faggot, and many others – contain a complex power that is at least in part because of their gestural suitability. When, on occasion, onion slicing turns abruptly to finger slicing, I don't say shoot, or golly, or even damn. I drop the old F bomb, repeatedly, because it works a lot better in expressing how I feel about the situation, and it simply feels right. My boy also is aware without really understanding that these words have the power we give to them when we tell youngsters not to say them, when we call them bad. If we were to have said, “don't you ever, EVER, say that word again, it is OFF LIMITS!”, then we all know where that would end. Don't push the red button, don't eat the forbidden fruit (it’s delicious by the way), and don't ask why.
The other thing he's learned came from a conversation, inspired by a brief encounter with a friend's mom on the street. I think what he asked was, “you mean a wife can have a wife, and a husband can have a husband?”, to which I told him that yes people can marry who they want. I almost added the word “now” at the end, but I didn't go there. As has been noted many times in the past, children rarely register any astonishment when encountering something that they previously did not know about the world. His response was predictable: “Oh, good, can I have a snack when we get home?” When I look back at my experience as a child, I am amazed at the difference. Those people were not talked about by the adults when I was a child, but they were all around, so we kids were left to our own devices. Fags, queers, gays, the ridiculous expansions to gaywad and queerbait, these words made up pretty much the entire lexicon for discussing diverse sexuality in the 1980s Danville, Kentucky ‘tween scene. For us guys, there was this archetypal effeminate, limp wristed, weak, lispy, half-man, the traits of whom were rigorously stifled by all, myself included. For girls it was more confusing, but had something to do with short hair, softball and unladylike consumer choices. On the soccer field I can remember being yelled at by my seniors for a tendency to hold my arm up but to let my large hand dangle, “Hammond, stop standing there like a fag!”
I feel slightly overwhelmed at the progress that has been made, and I am gutted to know that there are still those who don't think it's a good thing. When I talk to my son, all these wonderful terrible words are there, but I can also use other words that were simply not allowed when I was his age: love, family, marriage, mom, dad, aunt, uncle, brother, cousin, friend, colleague, relationship, best friend, teacher, boyfriend, girlfriend, gay, lesbian, straight, whatever. As a parent, I am filled with immense gratitude at raising my son with these words ready to hand when talking about sexual diversity. Mostly this is why: my boy is, already, I know all too well, who he is. I don't chose who he is, nor do I chose who he will be, nor can I instil anything that anyone can call a family value in him that will pilot the unendingly complex emergence of a young person’s sexuality away from, or indeed toward, being attracted to one particular sex. That is out of my hands. But what is not out of my hands is the responsibility to enable him to make his romantic and sexual relationships – life-long, short-term, “serious” or otherwise – good relationships. By “good” I mean to say, healthy, meaningful, generous, exciting, creative, perhaps even one day, procreative. That’s the task at hand.
And if he's gay, then he's gay. He is lucky that in my lifetime his immediate society has just started to say it's OK. May the world follow.