But it’s good to see. Ohio Representative Tyrone Yates introduced a bill to repeal a portion of the Ohio state constitution that imposed a ban on gay marriage.

I grew up in Ohio. I can only assume that it is not an easy place to be gay. There was no one in my high school that came out of any sort of closet (I was a social pariah for being an out atheist and feminist), although several people in my graduating class have since come out as homosexual. As far as I know, they’ve moved far away from my small town.

It’s a ridiculous long shot in a House and Senate controlled by conservative members that have vocally opposed gay marriage in the past. And sadly, Mr. Yates has reached his term limit so we can’t reward him with a campaign donation. But it still brings me a bit of hope to see the glimmer of change in my birth state.

This post is a complete retraction of several posts I’ve written over the past few years and represents a change of my own opinion regarding the words fag and faggot.  I have yet to change my mind on the inappropriate use of the word gay, but I’m reconsidering it.

Everyone hates being featured on a South Park episode.

When the two episodes on Atheism were released (Go, God, Go and Go, God, Go XII) Richard Dawkins was obviously upset about his portrayal and Atheists in countries where South Park isn’t even available to watch were getting pissed off about the content.

But Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the show’s creators (both of them Atheists who, because of the political garbage within modern Atheism, won’t call themselves Atheists), had a wonderful message for those in power in the Atheist community:  Your in-fighting is pitiful.  Long after religion fades away and the human race is at war with itself and highly evolved hyperintelligent otters, we will have nothing to blame but the lack of trust between Atheist groups and the venom spewed between Atheists, Agnostics, Humanists, Skeptics, Freethinkers and all the other convoluted names for groups that are, more or less, the same goddamn thing.

So even though it might suck to be called out on your foolishness by a poorly-animated cartoon character, you should listen to how the outside world views your group and learn from how you’re satirised.

The latest episode of South Park, The F Word, tackled how touchy many people are over the word faggot.

The town of South Park is beset by a large gang of middle-aged white men on Harley Davidson motorcycles.  When the people in town glare at them making loud motorcycle noise around parks, sidewalk cafés and weddings, the bikers reach the conclusion that everyone thinks they are cool motherfuckers.

Eric Cartman confronts the bikers outside a diner as they’re revving their Harleys and being noisy pricks.  He calls the attention of the bikers:  “Excuse me!  Excuse me!  Hey, assholes!  You guys know that everyone thinks you’re total fags, right?  […]  You know, when people like you drive down the streets with your unnecessarily loud motorcycles, thinking you’re all cool, everyone is actually laughing at you and calling you pathetic faggots.  You do realise this, right? […]  No, no.  No.  Nobody’s intimidated by it, actually.  Everybody realises that people who are so needy for attention they need to dress up and be as loud as possible are you guys and 16-year-old girls.  Just wanted to let you know, you’re fuckin’ fags.”

The bikers come to the conclusion that they are, indeed, cool, and that even if they weren’t, no one else would likely say anything, and they go about doing the same thing they’ve always done:  Piss everyone off with their noise.  They’re met with children all over South Park calling them fags.  Then the bikers decide to make even more noise, because, surely, the amount of noise made by a person in assless leather chaps is directly and positively proportional to the amount of coolness that faggot has.

As the bikers ride around, carrying horns, sirens, drums and other noisemakers, the kids of South Park meet to determine how to rid themselves of these quarrelsome faggots once and for all.  Cartman decides to crap on the seats of every biker after eating, “two, maybe three buckets of KFC, extra crispy, probably four cartons of gravy.”  Stan and Kyle take to spray-painting messages to the bikers all over town.

Each of Cartman’s fried-chicken-shits is adorned with a tiny flag reading, “You’re fags!”  On a Harley store billboard and across multiple buildings spans the graffiti, “Fags Get Out!”

Needless to say, the adults in town see this and, thinking the kids were being homophobic, confront the entire elementary school to find out who wrote the graffiti.  It wasn’t until halfway through the episode when the guidance councillor Mr. Mackey shouts, “Kyle and Stan, you’ve always been tolerant of gay people,” that the kids even start to make connections that “fag” means anything other than “obnoxious asshole”.

Because it is important to the case I will make regarding modern use of the word faggot, I will print here the full transcript of the meeting at the elementary school.

Mayor:  “Students, I am here because of a very serious matter.  This morning it was discovered that in several places all over town, somebody had spray-painted the words, ‘Fags get out!’  Many witnesses reported seeing children with spray paint.  Now if anybody knows anything about the kids who did this, you must come forew—”

Cartman:  “That was us!”

Mayor:  “’Scuse me?”

Stan:  “Yeah!  We did that!”

Kyle:  “Yeah!”

Mayor:  “Why would you write something like that and be proud of it?”

Kyle:  “Well, cause we want all those fags to get out of our town.”

Cartman:  “Yeah, everyone hates those fags, right?”

Kids:  “Yeah!”  “You bet!”  “I do!”  etc.

Mackey:  “Now just what the heck is going on here?  This is not what we have taught you in this school.  Kyle and Stan, you’ve always been tolerant of gay people.”

Stan:  “Gay people?”

Kyle:  “We aren’t talking about gay people.”

Mackey:  “You just admitted to spray-painting that they should get out of town!”

Stan:  “But why would we want gay people to get out of town?”

Cartman:  “Oh, they think we meant, ‘gay fags.’”

Kyle:  “Oh, hey, that’s not very nice, Mayor.  Just because a person is gay doesn’t mean he’s a fag.”

Mayor:  “What?!  You four boys, in my office NOW!”

The bikers go to the library and look up what the dictionary says about “faggots”.  They read through the origins of the word, from being an insult to women (fagot), to being a name for a bundle of sticks (insultingly named after the term for woman, calling women practically useless), to being an insult to poor people (fagot gatherer), to being an insult to elderly people (fagot, as in useless baggage), to being an insult to homosexuals (faggot).

The kids are then brought before what I assume to be a special tribunal at the city council.  I’ll post a transcript of this too, because it’s important to the case I will later make.

First councilman:  “We are really trying to understand this:  How is it you boys think that referring to gay people as fags in today’s world is acceptable?

Kyle:  “Because we’re not referring to gay people!  You can be gay and not be a fag.”

Stan:  “Yeah, a lot of fags aren’t gay.”

Second councilman:  “I happen to be gay, boys.  Do you think I’m a fag?”

Stan:  “Do you ride a big, loud Harley and go up and down the streets, ruining everyone’s nice time?”

Second councilman:  “No.”

Stan:  “Then you’re not a fag.”

First councilman:  “So what if a guy is gay and rides a Harley?”

Cartman:  “Then he’s a gay fag.  I mean, is this really this hard?”

Stan:  “I don’t know.”

Kenny:  (muffled)  “This is fucking ridiculous.”

Stan:  “Alright, look:  You’re driving in your car, kay?  And you’re waiting to make a left at a traffic signal.  The light turns yellow, should be your turn to go, but the traffic coming at you just keeps coming.  And even when the light turns red, a guy in a BMW runs the red light so you can’t make your left turn.  What goes through your mind?”

Third councilman:  “Fag.”

Stan:  “Right!  But you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, he’s a homosexual,’ you’re thinking, ‘Oh, he’s an inconsiderate douchebag like a Harley rider.”

First councilman:  “This—this is making insanely good sense to me.”

First councilwoman:  “Alright, what about this:  What would you call a straight man who doesn’t own a Harley, but likes them and might buy one someday?”

Cartman:  You call him bike-curious.”

First councilman:  “Bi-cur–"

Stan:  “Bike-curious!  Don’t you people keep up with today’s lingo at all?”

Kenny:  (Muffled)  “Jesus fucking Christ!”

Later, at a meeting of Act Out, South Park gay men’s advocates, Big Gay Al makes the point that fag no longer means to kids what it did a short time ago, and urges the gay men of South Park to adopt the Harley rider definition of the word in an effort to pass on the pejorative to another group and to get their loud bikes out of town.

Following all of this, the Mayor signs an ordinance changing the legal definition of faggot refer to annoying, inconsiderate Harley riders.   The national press smears the town as a large group of homophobic hicks for embracing the word faggot in its new meaning because it’s still in the dictionary as a negative word for homosexual.

This prompts the kids to invite “the dictionary people” to South Park to hear the arguments for a new definition of faggot.  The dictionary officials arrive, led by Emmanuel Lewis, the actor who played Webster on the sitcom Webster in the 1980s.  (Get it?)  During this meeting, the bikers ride in with guns and Molotov cocktails, laying siege to South Park and viciously battering Emmanuel Lewis.  The kids convince them to grudgingly accept the title of fags and they ride off to cause irritation and discomfort elsewhere.

The episode ends with Emmanuel declaring a new definition of fag and ends with the definition on a black screen.

Fag (făg) n. 1. An extremely annoying, inconsiderate person most commonly associated with Harley riders.
2. A person who owns or frequently rides a Harley.

In response to this episode, GLAAD, a perpetual embarrassment to gay rights advocacy, got their lacy panties in a twist.  They want to resist the natural evolution of the English language and, for whatever reason, hang on to this pejorative forever, keeping it a harmful word for gays rather than letting the use of the word change itself through the vernacular of today’s youth.

This is absolutely the wrong way of preventing further pain from coming from the word faggot.

I think the words faggot and nigger have some extremely close parallels, and the way we in the LGBT community should deal with the word faggot should be similar to the way those in the black community have dealt with the word nigger.  Making the word illegal encourages use of the word to cause hurt.  Trying to preserve the word in its painful past form only causes more hurt.

Lenny Bruce said it best:

Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers here tonight?" I know there’s one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let’s see, there’s two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there’s another kike— that’s two kikes and three niggers. And there’s a spic. Right? Hmm? There’s another spic. Ooh, there’s a wop; there’s a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there’s three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there’s one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kikes here, do I hear five kikes? I got five kikes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kikes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he’d just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" ’til nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.

(Emphasis mine.)

We look at the rap community and many of us (and by us, I mean rhythmless honkies like myself) have trouble understanding why so many black people have taken to embracing the word nigger, in the form of nigga, to use as a term of endearment for their black friends.  I believe it has a root in this method of coping with hate.  When you take the word that, for ages, has caused so much pain, and turn it into something friendly, you destroy its power to harm.

Another example is a joke I heard a while back on Comedy Central’s Premium Blend from comedienne René Hicks:

We’ve got to take that word and attach it to something so good and positive that it overwhelms all the bad things it’s been used for.  Something that will make people happy when they hear it. Like snack chips.  People love potato chips and corn chips and tortilla chips, so I’m going to make a new kind of chip called Niggers.  They’ll come in all kinds of tasty flavors, like Cheese Niggers, Sour Cream & Onion Niggers, Nacho Niggers, Onion & Garlic Niggers—but not Barbecue Niggers, I don’t like the sound of that—and they’ll be so good and everyone will love them so much, that the only time people will hear that word and get angry is when they go to a party where they don’t have any more.  ‘What do mean you don’t have any more Niggers?  It just isn’t a a party without Niggers.  All you’ve got are crackers, and you can’t have party with just crackers.’

(Emphasis mine.)

So what I’m suggesting is that the gay rights movement take a page out of the civil rights playbook handed down from our black brothers and sisters, a play that they didn’t necessarily mean to write, but it won them their equality and acceptability anyway:  I’m suggesting we let the word faggot go where it wants to in our language.  Let it change itself and stop holding it back to its hateful past.

There are three uses of nigger in American English.  There’s nigger, which is used offensively against black people; nigga, which is a term of endearment between some black people; and unrelated terms like nigger-rigged, which is a term meaning “assembled unconventionally” that has divorced itself from any recognisable former definition of nigger.  We’ll call those definitions, N1, N2, and N3, respectively.  Falling under N3 are any derivatives of nigger that are no longer used to reference black people.

Before I go any further, I would like to clarify that I would prefer a world where words meant to cause harm don’t become so embedded in society that they are ineradicable and the only way to destroy their power is to let time and use water them down.

With that said, us fags need an F1, and F2 and an F3.  Faggot, harmful; faggot, endearment; and faggot, unrelated, respectively.  There will always be those who use F1 as a method to knock people down, and they will always find a way to be hurtful.  But if we recognise F3 (“n. A repellent male: ex. You creepy fag. Stop it!”) as something completely different from homophobia, we can ignore that and focus on the real homophobia.

I don’t know about you fags, but, although I’ve never before used the word faggot in the F2 sense in public areas of the Internet, I’ve used it often with my friends, calling my gay and gay-friendly friends fags as a term of endearment.  Anyone who can understand the pain that word used to (and occasionally still does) cause is an honorary faggot (F2) in my book.  And I can’t think of anything more complimentary or endearing than to share my identity and what I’ve built my public life around with them.

And that’s what I took away from this episode of South Park.  GLAAD wants the ignorant hordes to be confused about what is and isn’t acceptable.  They want the public to live in fear of prosecution for using a word that’s really no more than six arbitrary letters crammed into two syllables.  That approach didn’t work for the NAACP, so I can’t see it working for GLAAD, but if they want to try it they can go right ahead.  I’m going to put on my big girl panties and face reality as it truly is, not cower from a word because of how badly it hurt the Stonewall fags or the Castro St. fags or any other brilliant fags throughout fag history.

If we learn anything from the etymology of faggot, it’s that words change, and slang words change wildly and quickly.  It’s time for faggot to change to something less vile, and I’m not about to let GLAAD, the most obnoxious group of fags in the US (and you can decide what definition I’m using there), stop that.

I would also like to use this post to apologise to Edwin Sarte, who I made an example of during my former hypocritical crusade to shame those who use the word faggot publicly.  He’s a bit of a twonk, but he’s one of the finest people I could ever declare an honorary faggot.

A new South Park episode, Dances With Smurfs, airs tonight on Comedy Central.

Over at Womanist Musings, she had a very interesting post about conscientious parents passing along heterosexist ideals, whether they mean to or not.  One section in particular really spoke to me:

[The erasure of non-traditional families from a child’s view] instills the idea that family must have a certain make up to be legitimate.  Even the language we use speaks of our desire to have heterosexual children.

Have you ever referred to a child’s future spouse in heterosexist ways?  It is quite common when speaking to [a] boy to talk about their future wife or girlfriend, as if that is the natural course of events.  We may teach our children that all people are equal but if we take the position of assumed heterosexuality when relating to them, in actuality we are sending a completely different message.

I worry about the message that I give to the children around me.  And it’s more than just a worry about presenting an implicit heteronormative view.  Do I speak in a manner that shows a marriage is the only way to have a committed relationship?  Am I reinforcing gendered expectations (girls are cute and dainty, boys are loud and strong)?  Am I assuming something about their religion based on what their parents have presented to me?  Am I assuming something about their gender identity or sexuality that they may not even know themselves?

As a doula, I work with people as they begin their journey as parents, and as they add to their family.  It’s a fairly vulnerable time; a lot of people don’t have experience handling small infants and children and want to make sure they do things the right way.  They look to the “experts” on advice for feeding, sleeping, and care, and apparently I look like an expert.  But these “expert” sources seem to not have a care for the language used and the assumptions made about these children and how they will grow up.

Obviously, these families are not mine.  And odds are, most of the children I encounter will grow up to pursue heterosexual relationships.  But starting young with inclusive language (and REALLY MEANING IT) may mean the difference between a kid that comes out to family and friends, is well supported, and is happy and healthy, and a kid who doesn’t make it through zir teenage years.  I suppose the best I can do is model behavior and language in the hopes that this idea of inclusiveness and understanding takes hold.  I wish there was more.

Hmm… it appears that the Mormon church is attempting to be magnanimous and allow the LGBTQ community SOME rights within Utah.  Just not The Gay Marriage.  What a deliciously condescending attitude.  “We’ll let the animal out of the cage, teach it some tricks and give it a ball to play with.  Aren’t we so damn nice?  Please don’t hate us anymore.”

Do gay people live in Utah?  I mean, not ones that are shoved into the closet by their homophobic Elders and parents?  Cause, I mean, I’m straight and I sure as hell wouldn’t live in Utah.

I really have got to quit reading the news right before bedtime.  Now I’m all riled up and shit.