by Krista Al Qirim

Created on: February 03, 2010

I don’t think derogatory terms like “fag” can ever be anything but insulting once as ingrained as they are in our collective consciousness.  Not because the words are inherently bad—of course not!  They’re just letters; it’s people who attach meaning to them.  But eventually, the meaning attached becomes so integral a part of the word that divorcing negative meaning from the word becomes impossible.  Sure, a “fag” can be a cigarette, it can be firewood, but the derogatory reference to homosexuals is the one that sticks in the brain and won’t wash out. 

Take “gay.”  A perfectly innocuous word, used to mean “cheerful and lighthearted.”  Then it became a synonym for homosexual—a rather nice turn, really.  Considering all the awful terms that have been used to describe homosexuals, it was refreshing to see a “nice” word associated with them.  Sadly, that didn’t last long.  In the past few years, “gay” has increasingly come to mean “lame,” “stupid,” or “worthless.”  “That’s so GAY!” has become the catchphrase for a generation of insensitive people who wouldn’t dream of turning words or phrases that describe other groups of people into pejoratives.     

Think about it.  “That’s so stupid—it’s practically HISPANIC!” or “How totally HANDICAPPED of you!”  No, those aren’t going to fly, and with good reason.  But “gay?”   Open season, apparently.

Once a truly awful meaning has been attached to a word, it’s not likely to disappear anytime soon.  Hence, once perfectly respectable words like “spook” (a ghost), “queer” (something strange or unusual), and “niggardly” (an utterly non-racial term referring to miserly or thrifty ways) have been forever tainted and rendered unusable. 

Ours is a long history of creating, using, then shelving slurs and derogatory terms meant to “describe” certain groups.  “Fag” is just one in a long line.  As with those that came before, “fag” will fade, only to be replaced by something else.  Because that’s how this works—until we can do something about the underlying prejudices and unfair opinions, there will always be a new word to take the place of the old.  Still, we should struggle to have these words tabled, we should continue to rail against their use even though we know they’ll be replaced by newer (yet just as ugly) terms.

Why?  Isn’t it an endless battle, a Sisyphean task?  No, I don’t believe it is.  I think that, with every nasty word we manage to jerk from our collective vocabulary, we educate those prone to using them just a little bit.  We bring a few over to our side with each battle, and that makes the fighting worth our effort every time.  So, while the word “fag” is likely beyond redemption, we can continue to fight the use of such derogatory terms in hopes of changing the world just a little bit.  Who knows?  Maybe someday there won’t be any insulting terms to describe any group of people.  Wouldn’t that be queer in a most wonderful way?

Learn more about this author, Krista Al Qirim.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.