It was around 2 a.m. on a Saturday when a hoarse voice from a fast car called me a faggot.
It was 1998, and I was walking home alone after making heart eyes at go-go boys at the Lucky Horseshoe on Halsted Street, Chicago’s main gay strip. The car didn’t slow down. I did, cold with fear but hot from shame for being clocked as not just gay — he got that right — but a fag.
Dazed, I stopped at Taco & Burrito House for tacos that I ate at my apartment as I called the local 24-hour anti-gay violence hotline — a duty, I felt. The kind person on the phone apologized that this happened and thanked me for reporting it.
I don’t always remember what I did yesterday, but I remember this day, the most disquieting of many times “faggot” has cut me. I would bet that any gay man who has been called a faggot, whether spat by a bully or muttered by his own father, remembers when and where it happened, unless they hear it so often they numb to its firepower.
And yet this year at least six theater productions have used “faggot” in their titles, and it doesn’t feel like a coincidence. As I walk past the word emblazoned on posters and imagine straight people stumbling over its fricative F at the box office, I’m unsettled. Why is a slur that a stranger hurled at me now waving hello from my playbill?
In New York, Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot,” a naughty dramedy imagining a grown-up, queer and kinky Prince George, is being staged at Studio Seaview through Dec. 13, its third extension. Earlier this year, you could have seen Kevin Carillo’s “Figaro/Faggots” at Baryshnikov Arts, a fusion of Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Faggots,” Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel of gay sexcess, as well as revivals of Topher Payne’s 2013 play “Angry Fags” at Theater Lab in New York and from Ghostlight Ensemble Theater in Chicago.
Yet to come at the Park Avenue Armory is the North American premiere of “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions” (Tuesday through Dec. 14), a stage version of Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s manifesto of gay liberation from 1977, adapted by the writer-director Ted Huffman and the composer Philip Venables.
In a nod to the word’s global reach, Victor Rodger’s “Black Faggot” played at the Court Theater in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Hadrien Daigneault-Roy and Sascha Cowan’s “Faggot*s,” an adaptation of “Faggots and Their Friends” for a solo performer, was at Berliner Ringtheater in Berlin.
Gay men have long loved calling one another fags. (“The Queens’ Vernacular,” a 1972 gay lexicon, logs this camp usage: “Do you think this shade of lipstick makes my lips look faggy?”) At Studio Seaview, I even considered buying a “Prince Faggot” tote bag.
Maybe I’m overreacting. Jeremy O. Harris, the “Slave Play” author and a producer of “Prince Faggot,” suggested I stop pearl-clutching over a word. Sometimes theater tests.
Besides, he added, “‘Prince Gay’ would mean nothing.”
The men behind these shows have personal, complicated relationships with the word “faggot.” Carillo, who directed and choreographed “Figaro/Faggots,” was called one by a passer-by as he walked to a rehearsal at Baryshnikov Arts.
“I thought I was looking great, I had on a new outfit,” he told me. After it occurred, he remembered thinking: “Well, that’s dumb. But really, it was a badge of honor. It strengthened the punch I was putting into the work.”
Huffman, who is directing the Park Avenue Armory production, said “faggot” is spoken hundreds of times in the show “with love and joy and silliness.” After performances of the production in 2023 at the Manchester International Festival in England and the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, European audience members, often themselves not queer, told him that the way the word was deployed robbed it of its shock value and gave it “a new power,” he said.
“It feels really meaningful to hear that you can change the feeling of a word in a couple of hours,” Huffman said.
Homophobic, sexist and racist slurs have of course been used in theater and other artistic genres before, whether to make a statement, get a rise or reclaim a hateful word for the people it has been used against. In 1973, Al Carmine’s satirical revue “The Faggot” got decent reviews Off Broadway. In the late ’70s, the pioneering Black queer composer Julius Eastman used slurs as titles, a provocation that “is part of the work, and does the work,” Tannahill said.
In 2001, “No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs,” by the Black playwright John Henry Redwood, ran Off Broadway. In an author’s note, Redwood, who died in 2003, said he was taken aback by a request to change the name for a production in Philadelphia.
“If I deny the title, I deny my personal history, my experience, my memories, which, I believe, is tantamount to negating myself,” he wrote.
I believe artists should call their art what they want. I’m not offended by slurs in a theatrical context, either. In the new Broadway revival of “Ragtime,” there’s a thesaurus worth, against Black people, Jews, the Irish. It’s solid dramaturgy. But the only way to experience them is to see the production or read the script.
When “faggot” is in the title, screaming, as does “Prince Faggot,” in towering letters on the side of a building, visible to passers-by and to people eating at Chick-fil-A across the street, the assumption of reclamation feels unearned.
Unlike “queer,” a term that is still debated but which has been redeemed beyond the in-group to become mainstream, outsiders haven’t yet gentrified “faggot” (as they have “queen” and gay bars and drag brunch and poppers). Straight men get called “faggot” too, but for gay men, the shame hits closer, punishingly.
Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, where “Prince Faggot” had its premiere this summer in a Soho Rep co-production, said our relationship to a play starts when we first hear about it. That’s especially true with “Prince Faggot.”
“Whether it’s distaste or anxiety or intrigue, the title positions you in the play before you know anything about it,” he said.
The language scholar Gregory Coles framed my discomfort as a question of decontextualization.
“The weird thing about a space in Times Square is we don’t know who the speaker is, and the presumed audience seems to be everybody,” said Coles, an adjunct professor of communication at Roberts Wesleyan University. “It’s disorienting because our brains are coded to be looking for context, and the word triggers this ambivalence in our interpretive minds.”
Huffman, Tannahill and Carillo — gay men who told me they’d been slurred with “faggot” — could have called their works anything, yet they chose a word that might make patrons angry and marketers antsy.
For Huffman, who in October was named the general director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, working with a book that already incorporated the word made it feel like a call of duty.
“The use of language in the book is so specific and so brilliantly chosen that to not use the title would be to undo something essential about it,” he said. “If you could write the book title when Larry Mitchell did, then certainly we can have the bravery to put that title in front of an audience.”
Still, the Armory’s website offers a content advisory that I bet the maverick Mitchell and Asta would have bristled at: “The makers of this work recognize that ‘faggot’ is a provocative word — one that for many isn’t easy to read or hear.”
Tannahill said he never thought about calling his play anything else.
“‘Prince Faggot’ is punchy, and as a title it helps to lodge in people’s brains,” he said.
I asked word aficionados to weigh in. Jonathan Dent, a senior editor working on the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, explained that “faggot” dates to the 14th-century Middle English “fagot,” or a bundle of sticks used as fuel. In North America, it emerged as a slur as early as 1913 when it became attached to men considered to be feminine.
As dictionary people do, he sounded eager to keep an eye on the word’s future.
“It’s going to be interesting to see where the word goes if it’s getting a higher profile in things like titles of shows,” he said.
Meredith G.F. Worthen, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma, seemed less interested.
“I get nervous to give our words to the straight community,” said Worthen, who studies sexualities and L.G.B.T.Q. stigma. With “faggot,” she added, “the harm value of hearing the word has not been taken away.”
In the queer bubble that is New York, these shows have drawn little ballyhoo. Concerned about potential backlash, Playwrights Horizons contacted a board member who specializes in crisis communications to develop a contingency plan. It was never needed.
Greenfield said some Playwrights Horizons staff members and ticket buyers declined to say “Prince Faggot,” choosing instead “Prince F.” But other than to-be-expected online chatter, the show’s run ended without controversy.
Tannahill chalked that up to being in New York with audiences who expect a show called “Prince Faggot” to be in your face.
“The word ‘faggot,’ if you’re up for it, let’s go,” he said. “If not, ‘Wicked’ is down the street.”
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