If you’re part of the LGBTQIA+ community, you already know the weight this word carries. Faggot has long been used as a slur meant to distill hatred into a single syllable, most often aimed at gay men and those perceived as queer. Nearly everyone I know in this community has been called it and carries their own story. I know mine. I was six years old, in first grade, when someone used it against me for the first time. I didn’t understand sexuality then, but that didn’t matter. Queerness was projected onto me anyway, reinforced by peers and adults alike, teaching me early that being gay was “bad” and being straight was “good.” This blog isn’t about reliving that trauma. It’s about what happens next.

The word faggot comes from the Old French fagot, meaning a bundle of sticks or firewood. In medieval Europe, those bundles fueled executions by burning, including people accused of heresy or “sodomy,” tying the word directly to punishment, disposability, and state violence. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it evolved into a slur used to police masculinity and dehumanize queer people. That history matters. It explains why the word still lands so heavily today, even as some queer people have reclaimed it in specific, consensual community contexts.

Research shows this word doesn’t just come from outside our community. Meredith G. F. Worthen’s 2024 study found that some cisgender queer men use fag or faggot against other queer men not because of sexuality, but to enforce masculinity and uphold cisnormative standards. Those who most strongly value traditional masculinity are more likely to use the slur to distance themselves from femininity or gender nonconformity. In other words, stigma doesn’t disappear just because it’s spoken by someone queer. It can still wound. It can still reinforce hierarchies.

And yet, this is where I introduce a third lens to dismantle the slur and power, understanding of the sissy. Not as a joke, not as a provocation, but as a reality that has long been used to mark certain bodies as excessive, improper, or disposable. I reclaim faggot not as an insult and not as a badge of dominance, but as a neutral truth about how I am seen, read, and often misinterpreted in the world. If that is the word you reach for when you see me, I refuse to let it carry shame, fear, or authority over my body, my gender expression, or my humanity. I do not internalize it, and I do not perform respectability to escape it. Instead, I strip the word of its violence by meeting it with comfort, self-awareness, and choice.

My faggotery is not tragic, broken, weak, or in need of fixing. It is not a failure of masculinity or a deviation from some imagined norm. It simply exists, as I exist, without apology. By naming myself on my own terms, I disrupt the purpose the word was designed to serve: to wound, to silence, and to enforce hierarchy. I refuse to carry the burden of a history that sought to erase people like me, even as I remain fully aware of that history.

Reclamation is not denial. It does not pretend the harm never happened, nor does it ask everyone to participate in the same way. Reclamation is a personal and political act, rooted in consent, context, and agency. For me, reclaiming this word is about survival and self-definition. It is about choosing how language moves through my body instead of letting it be used against me. It is about taking what was meant to diminish me and rendering it powerless by refusing to let it define the boundaries of my worth.

Reference

Worthen, M. G. F. (2024). I’m queer but you’re a fag: Queer men’s cisnormativity, perceptions of masculinity, and their use of the “fag/faggot” slur using norm-centered stigma theory. Sexuality & Culture, 29(1), 38–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-024-10283-3