Author's comment: I use he/him and they/them pronouns!
The First Time My Brother Called Me a “Faggot”
“Faggot!”
My body froze in the silence that followed. Angry that I had defended my sister from his sexist attacks, my older brother had shifted his attention to me. My mother, tears tracing the wrinkles down her face, said nothing. My sister, her eyes avoiding mine, also said nothing. My sexuality had never been a topic of discussion, but my tears confirmed what everyone in the room already suspected: I am queer. In that awful silence, I could do nothing but cry.
Thankfully, my father was working an overnight shift and wasn’t present at the time. When I was seven, he’d returned home from work to see my nails painted a baby pink hue that I’d fallen in love with while scrimmaging through my sisters’ nail polishes. “I didn’t raise a faggot!” he’d yelled. The anger in his voice still echoes in my mind whenever I see the color pink. I’d spent countless nights praying for my queerness to go away before crying myself to sleep at the foot of the tiny bed in which my mother, father, sister and I all slept. Sometimes, my sobs would wake my parents, who would scold me for being too noisy, worried that I’d wake my auntie and her children who’d generously given us a room for the winter months because we had nowhere else to go. I’d wake up the next day no less feminine than I was when I went to bed.
In the second semester of my junior year, I interned for Buried Seedz of Resistance, a youth-led advocacy organization focused on addressing the violence experienced by queer people of color. At my first day interning for BSeedz, Cecelia, a nonbinary femme, caught my attention. Her nails were painted a pink hue that reminded me of my own when I was seven. Noticing me noticing her, Cecelia began explaining the significance of the posters around the office. “Do you know about reclamation?” she asked in her high-pitched voice while pointing to a poster with homophobic and transphobic terms. My eyes fixated on one term in particular: faggot. Cecelia continued, “Many of us at BSeedz have learned to reclaim the terms used to disempower us. If you take a word that’s been used to hurt you and turn it into something beautiful, something that’s liberating, what then can they do?”
As I reflect on the underlying hypermasculine culture in my family, I realize it’s easy but unproductive to simply vilify all men in my community as homophobic. To do so would be to paint a superficial picture of what is really a complex mural. My father, who dropped out of school in the sixth grade to support his family, was the youngest of seven. His recollections of his childhood filled with poverty and violence reveal a narrative in which men are supposed to be strong, not to simply prove their masculinity, but because the rest of their family’s survival depended on it. I understand now that though his internalized homophobia is unjustifiable, he only wishes for me to be strong during this time of financial instability. And though he’s escaped the violence that plagued his childhood, living paycheck to paycheck and working incredulous hours still convince him that men in our family need to be strong.
Although I was angry at my family for a long time, I realized that I was more angry at myself. My own guilt and shame had robbed me of my voice. I ask myself, after years of struggling to come to terms with my sexuality, what I would do now if called a “faggot.” I would answer, unequivocally: “If being a torch and lighting my culture out of its homophobia makes me a faggot, then I am more than happy to be one.” I’ve reclaimed the term for its original meaning – a bundle of sticks used as a light source.