on being called a faggot, like, all the time in new york city

I have a serious question for you: is the way I look at my phone gay? I only ask because earlier today on a downtown 6, I was standing there crafting a press release on my phone when a guy got on at 23rd street, promptly muttered the word “faggot,” and then sat in front of me. Standing there—quite buttoned-up, as it were, on my way to teach—I wondered if what had just happened actually had just happened. Did I imagine him regarding me upon his entrance before that effortless acknowledgment? “Faggot.” Did I imagine his disdainful glare, continuing in that very moment?

I stared back, hoping he’d say it again. Then I’d know for sure. Then I’d say something. Then I’d be the radical queer activist I had imagined myself becoming, especially over the last couple weeks since the Pulse shooting, talking my big game on Facebook and over coffee to friends. Then I’d put my “enough is enough” money where my mouth is. I had a couple sentences ready. They burned in my chest. I would finally stand up for myself.

But we remained deadlocked, and I remained swimming in equal-parts anger and doubt. And rationalizations.

Say it again!

But he didn’t. I got off at Astor Place, waiting even then for him to repeat the word as I exited, which happens sometimes. I had sentences planned for that, too. But nothing happened. Maybe none of it happened. Maybe I’m going crazy.

I’d planned on grabbing a salad before teaching, but suddenly I’d lost my appetite. Maybe a smoothie. A gay smoothie? Ugh. See, so actually this is what pisses me off—that mine is not a story of courage, but rather a story where the bad guy wins and I don’t get a salad, where he goes on with his day unpunished, unembarrassed, while my brain remains absolutely poisoned. In this moment, I don’t feel like a faggot. I feel like a coward.

Anyway, I actually get called a faggot a lot. In fact, before New York I lived in Texas and Indiana, but only since moving here to the Big Apple have I, as an adult, been called a faggot—and a handful of times, mind you.

Off the top of my head, there was once on a bike with one of my best friends, once in the sidewalk near Times Square (I’d bumped into one of those people handing out newspapers, so he called me a faggot), once exiting a subway station at Union Square, another time on a subway in Brooklyn, another time on the upper west side while running to a friend’s gig at a church. More may come to me.

I came away from these experiences the same way I came away from today—wondering honestly if I run gay, sit gay, ride a bike gay, bump into people gay, walk up the stairs gay, type press releases into my phone gay. Do my straight friends get called a faggot when they, too, run down the street or type into their phone on the subway, or am I really, truly, just so gay that it seeps through my various forms of heteronormative drag?

I also come away from these situations seething with anger. At myself, that is. I replay fantasies in my mind where I handle things differently, where I demand some kind of… no, not an apology, fuck that… but where I go into a kind of Steven Seagal mode and give these people just a taste of the humiliation, or the memory of humiliation, rather, that gets triggered in an adult like me when a word like that surfaces after a bully-conditioned childhood.  

Yes, every time that it’s growled or muttered in my direction I remember, more than the chants and heckles that followed me right up through high school, the whispers of an eighth grade boy, a year older than me—his name was Tom—who one day cooed between the seats of the school bus that he was going to kill me. Woven into the tapestry of his promise was his name for me. “Faggot.” Frozen in my seat, I didn’t say a word. I wonder if he remembers.