IT’S FUN TO BE GAY, PART 3

It’s time to talk about the 800-pound faggot in the living room.

I got in trouble recently because of my comments in an online discussion of a scene from Louis C.K.’s new show where there is a lengthy discourse about the word “faggot.”

I can remember several incidents where my only close gay friend — me — was called that “other F word.”

The history of me being called gay names is a history of being told something I didn’t know, like when someone tells you, “You have a booger in your nose”; and then later, after I knew: something I didn’t realize was perceptible.

I had to be told many times before I finally went along with it and became gay.

WHAT DID I DO?

One day in middle-school French class, we had to do a skit that involved people shaking hands. George MacDonald (real name) was a lithe swimteam star. Notwithstanding his last name, he was Greek. Or just looked Greek. I remember he dyed his hair from black to blond, because the roots showed.

He had always been pretty cool toward me, so it surprised me, when I shook his hand, that he recoiled and shouted, “Faaaag, man!” with a grossed-out chortle to the class at large.

Everyone laughed. I pleaded with him, from the public humiliation moment till we both sat back down in our schooldesks, to tell me what made him say that. This challenge was my way of focusing the attention on him, not me. I was despairingly trying to contain the fire that had destroyed my dignity in the classroom. But in addition I was genuinely mystified!

Seeing I was in agony, he showed mercy. Head tilted “dude-to-dude” style, he told me what happened, in a lower voice than the one he used to call me a fag: As I had shaken his hand, my pinky had crept down to the non-handshake part of the hand, the underside near the wrist. I was unaware my pinky had done this. I have small hands so shaking hands is awkward.

He then demonstrated what happened by shaking hands with me again, playing my part and letting his pinky roam a little.

Phew! What I did was “faggy,” but I wasn’t necessarily a fag. It was and is plausible that he could have said “Faaaag, man!” to one of his non-fag buds, too, and everyone would have laughed then as well. Just at the word, you know. I could now go back to imagining I was a normal dude. Never mind the strange warm feeling I got in my solar plexus when George reenacted the handshake.

CHILDREN CAN BE SO CRUEL

A couple years after that I researched and signed up for a summer abroad program in Bayonne, France. I was the second guest in a row the French family had hosted that summer, and everyone (except a young aunt) made it embarrassingly clear to me that the first guy was much preferred.

They described a gregarious, glad-handing, back-slapping sports lover, and their eyes got starry whenever his name came up over and over again. Chad or Chip or Chaz or something. They saw me as an insult to the memory of their beloved great American hero. I could read it in their facial expressions.

But the aunt, late 20s I guess, told me confidentially that she liked me much better than Chiz. She saw value in me. I made her laugh, and she didn’t give a shit about sports, either. “Le Sport? Je m’enfou!”

One August day her 8-year-old son Alexandre pointed at me and said, “Pédé.” I asked his older female cousin Anne what that meant and she acted out a limp-wristed sissy walk. Oh, that again.

This time I simply denied it. Nope! You’re wrong. But the kid insisted he was right. Maybe he had somehow spotted me furtively looking at the pictures in Gai Pied, an R-rated gay magazine, in the town’s little bookstore, which I did repeatedly without thinking about why I was doing it.

It was pretty insubordinate to call someone twice your age a fag to their face and think you would get away with it, but remember, this family was pretty much an all-asshole family.

The incident came and went. Someone instructed him not to call me that anymore and that was that.

WHAT GAVE ME AWAY?

Ten years later, and five or so years after proving the French kid right, I was riding my bike down the street in Philly (truly the Town Without Pity of song and legend) when someone driving by yelled, “Get out of the road, you fucking queer!” I’ve written about this incident before (my response to him was “You’re fat”) so I’ll just repeat it with this sole comment: I remember wondering, Why me? What did I do? I was not riding my bike swishily. I was not in drag. I had on a typical men’s shirt, pants, a helmet (not a feather boa).

How did the angry fat man know?

Fast forward another 10 years to the present day. By now I have fully blossomed into a bitter, angry, hateful adult. It is dusk. I hail a cab on a semi-deserted street in Georgetown. I cross the street and open the passenger door closest to me. The cabbie starts to yell at me for not going around to the sidewalk-side door. Revealing himself to be as big a rageaholic as I am, he bellows: “That is against the law! I can get in trouble! Lose my license!”

My breathing is heavy, my body fills up with adrenaline and I yell back at him in a whiplike voice: “That’s not any of my fucking business! The fuck do you think you’re talking to? I’ll get in on this side, or that side, I’ll do whatever the fuck I want, because I’m the customer!”

Our tedious, passionately waged argument continues for another 15 seconds or so. The cab turns the corner. “Stop right here,” I say, and I get out.

He rolls down his window and calls after me in a superior tone, like he had won: “Simple faggot!”

But I actually won because I didn’t retaliate by calling him a word that also has two Gs surrounded by a vowel and a consonant on each end, one where he definitely wouldn’t have had to wonder how I “knew.”

Instead I pondered this, and still do ponder it: What did he mean by “simple”?

Tags: Bayonne, France, Gai Pied, Louis C.K., Pédé, Philadelphia, Videogum