There was that time a guy held a knife at my throat and told me quietly and precisely what he thinks about faggots. It got me to thinking about this myself.
In mid-medieval Europe, so-called sodomites — typically meaning men who have sex with men — were burned alive for their uncommon love by a theoretically celibate priesthood. “Faggot” is an ancient term for a bundle of sticks bound to be burned as kindling. If a sodomite groveled properly they could be suffered to live so long as they wore a faggot emblem on their clothing as a warning. In British slang, the term fag means either a homosexual male or burning cigarette.
He had not asked me for a smoke or a blow job. There was something else behind his eyes.
Manhood is a self-aware social role instilled in boys by society. It is made, not taken. It emerges from effort and recognition, not beards or mere testosterone. One becomes a man by lifting true weight more than twice. Not all males become men. Not at all.
He looked manly at the bar, wearing his beer gut and a beard.
Manhood is a cord from which societies weave safety nets for the state of nature, because nature has true weight. So methods to ready boys for weaving are woven into more durable human cultures. Rites to light a taper from the fire of a man’s gaze, so a boy might see light in his own.
He took my wallet, along with my ability to stop shaking near straight males while sober.
Rites of the men’s house — of seeing and being seen a man — predate written history. Even in America, scarred as we are by absent fathering, manhood rituals are still practiced far from the sports bar din. Men still rise. Or they don’t, aging instead as boys rewriting each last fight they picked.
I wonder how this one learned to hate faggots.
In the ancient rites, a boy must leave his mother’s rule, descend into the ashes beneath his ego, see his wounds, accept his death, and be raised to join in caring for his community with the men. Death and resurrection. The way is not exactly hidden.
Did someone call him a “faggot” or “queer,” or maybe just “gay?”
For a millennium, though only that, Western civilization and its progeny have been taught from the pulpit to ban men who touch men as sodomites. This, even though Ezekiel 16:49 says the “sins of your sister Sodom” were arrogance and gluttony, not uncommon love. Church politics last long and are mostly played in the shadows.
Where did he stand when balls flew to play Smear the Queer?
The core experiential fact of male homosexual orientation is to be aroused by cock while owning one of your own. This resonance leads to narcissism if a boy never steps from his mama’s skirt. If he never feels his little death in the gaze of another man. If he never rises into his own power and the will to freely give it.
Still, how will a faggot ripen if men shun him for seeing their beauty and loving their wounds? Shun him as if they are powerless to consent. Shun him as if the only male touch is a punch.
Boys watch closely. The clever ones fight with words.
Being kicked to the margins can flip a switch. The margins are scattered with ashes. Humanity is riddled by secret elders. Ways open for those who remember.
Faggots do ripen. Faggots spread seed. No faggot with memory is untouched by the burning years. Untreatable AIDS was a vast sacrificial ritual, hurling gobbets of humanity’s greatest creators onto pyres of public neglect. The latest replay of an ancient scapegoating. A ritual to let some remember a humanity greater, older, and richer than the churches tell. One to call our mother-men and beauty-makers back from shadows to the hearth.
Until next time.
However it may be gained, and regardless of whom we fuck, manhood demands taking hold and willing release. Seeking past boundaries. Accepting limits while moving on. Witnessing wounds and loving anyhow.
Faggots know all about such things, if we live to tell.
Leo Marcel Schuman was born and raised in Billings, Montana, then spent 36 years in Portland, Oregon, while it was weird. He moved back home to Montana with his husband of twenty-four years just in time to enjoy the Covid epidemic while living six blocks down the street from legislators who think masks and vaccinations should be illegal. His color is purple, he lodges with masons, and he is allergic to simplistic answers. He writes for Old Truck Good Coffee (dot com), and his work-in-progress is a memoir titled Billyville: Confessions of a Post-Punk Homo Altar Boy from Montana.