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But Time television and media critic James Poniewozik makes a distinction between discussions of slurs and actually using a slur — a distinction that is sometimes lost, especially recently. He blogged, “Calling someone ‘faggot’ out of anger or contempt is one thing; quoting the word faggot or acknowledging that the word faggot is a slur that exists in the world — as I did in this sentence — is another entirely. Making the word taboo even in quotation or reference … not only fetishizes it and makes it more powerful, it makes honest discussion of important issues more difficult, because it makes the very conversation seem furtive and illicit.”

Muddying the waters is the fact that, like many words used as slurs, faggot is often used by gay men themselves, just as lesbians frequently use the word dyke to refer to themselves or other lesbians. There is some debate in the GLBT community over the reclaiming of hate speech for our own use, but from Larry Kramer's Faggots to Michael Thomas Ford's That's Mr. Faggot to You, it would be hard to strip this particular word from the vocabulary of gay culture.

Gay characters in television shows are often depicted using the words faggot or fag, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. NBC's Will and Grace used the term fag in all kinds of contexts. Will once greeted his best friend, Jack, as “Notorious F.A.G.” In a poignant 1999 episode, Jack overhears Will at the gym saying he wasn't comfortable being seen with Jack sometimes because he was “such a fag.” Jack eventually tells Will, “I'd rather be a fag than afraid.”

On Showtime's Queer as Folk, faggot was shouted at a gay, teenage character by a classmate who ultimately bashed him, and the word was spray-painted on another character's car as an act of vandalism. But it was also used as a positive, self-defining term, most powerfully by the nebbishy Ted when he tells a friend going through an ex-gay conversion program that since God doesn't make mistakes, “You must be exactly the way he wants you to be, the way he intended you to be. And that goes for every person, every planet, every mountain, every grain of sand, every song, every tear and every faggot.”

GLAAD's Giuliano recently said to USA Today: “What is clear is that it is a word now used to denigrate and dehumanize people — and not just gay people. It's a tear-you-apart kind of a term.” And after the recent firestorm over Grey's Anatomy star Isaiah Washington calling a gay cast mate a “faggot,” series co-star Katherine Heigl called for the word to be “obliterated” and said, “It breeds hate.”

While only sticks and stones can break your bones, words like faggot are often part of hate-motivated violence. I once had my head smashed into a car windshield by a man who called me a “dyke.” While I suppose the real problem was the head-against-the-windshield part, not the calling-me-a-dyke part, it's stayed in my memory in a different way than a similar road rage incident that didn't involve a slur against my sexuality.

Controversy around the use of reclaimed hate speech by the group it targets is not likely to be over anytime soon, nor is there anything to be gained by using cute little asterisks and coy euphemisms in a frank discussion of the use of the word itself. But faggot is not a “naughty name”; it is a slur. Trivializing offensive terminology is itself offensive, and no amount of spin can change that.

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