by André Wheeler @andre_daren, Culture Reporter @GuardianUS, Author of: SECOND COMING

Growing up, “faggot” was the one word I never wanted to be called. I could stand sissy, punk and even homo. But “faggot” felt like a scarlet letter I would never be able to remove once someone pinned it on me. As a black, still-figuring-it-out queer kid at a conservative Texas middle school, I quickly surmised this social truth: being a fag meant being a punchline and a punching bag.

So I lowered my voice two decibels, made sure not to talk with my hands, and wore subdued, muted colors. My focus was on not being found out. Just make it through high school, I told myself, and then I could be my faggiest self and not worry about being whipped with the slur.

But the work I put in to avoid being labeled a fag continued long after I came out of the closet, because I found that even gay men use the word as a verbal punch. Toxic thinking overflows in the gay community, where there’s an outsized idolization of rugged masculinity that research shows has serious harmful effects on the queer male psyche. We end up policing each other’s queerness through exclusion, and the word “fag” is frequently used to build those borders. As a Crossfit-loving guy once put it in his Grindr profile, “No femm fags pls.”

Recently, though, something strange has begun to happen in my relationship with the word. Scrolling through social media late last year, I discovered gay men delivering a host of tongue-in-cheek, self-depreciating jokes about it. Read more via the Guardian