The courage of many gay men every day in facing down hatred and scorn and derision to live lives of dignity and integrity is not a sign of being a wuss or somehow weak. You want to meet someone with balls? Find a drag queen. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men - and certainly nothing weak about many of them. A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. It's how insecure or bigoted straight men police their world to keep the homos out.Īnd for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest. And that's what she was doing: trying to delegitimize and feminize a man by calling him a faggot. This, Ms Coulter, is real social policing by speech. He is exactly the kind of straight guy who is targeted as a 'faggot' by his straight peers. He's pretty, he has flowing locks, he's young-looking. Coulter chose the latter use of the slur, its most potent and common form. The word 'faggot' is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man. In fact, in the schoolyard she cites, the primary targets of the f-word are straight boys or teens or men. The premise of this argument is that the word faggot is only used to describe gay men and is only effective and derogatory when used against a gay man. (That's why this affair is so revealing, because it is showing which elites want to pander to bigots, and which do not.)Ĭoulter's defense of the slur is that it was directed at an obviously straight man and so could not be a real slur. I think the response so far suggests that the conservative elites don't want to go there, but the base has already been there for a very long time. To put it simply, either conservatism is happy to be associated with that atmosphere, or it isn't. It was an ugly atmosphere, designed to make any gay man or woman in the room feel marginalized and despised. I was in the room, so I felt the atmosphere personally. She added to the joke a slur: 'John Edwards is a faggot.' That's why people gasped and then laughed and clapped so heartily. She could have made a joke about that - a better one, to be sure - but a joke. Her joke was that the world is so absurd that someone like Isaiah Washington is forced to go into rehab for calling someone a 'faggot.' She's absolutely right that this is absurd and funny and an example of p.c. And when you unpack Coulter's joke, you see she does both. Her logic suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. Her defense, however, is that she was making a joke, not speaking a slur. As evidence of how pro-gay she is, check out all the gay men and women in America now defending her. Apart from backing a party that wants to strip gay couples of all legal rights by amending the federal constitution, kick them out of the military where they are putting their lives on the line, put them into 'reparative therapy' to 'cure' them, keep it legal to fire them in many states, and refusing to include them in hate crime laws, Coulter is very pro-gay. Why would gays care? She is 'pro-gay,' after all. It was, in her words, a 'school-yard taunt,' directed at a straight man, meaning a 'wuss' and a 'sissy'. Her argument is that it was a joke and that since it was directed at a straight man, it wasn't homophobic. Coulter has an actual argument in self-defense and it's worth addressing. I'm not going to breathe more oxygen into this story except to say a couple of things that need saying. And no faggots were on the show to defend themselves. 'We're all friends here,' Hannity chuckled at the end. The way in which Fox News and Sean Hannity and, even more repulsively, Pat Cadell, shilled for her was a new low for Fox, I think - and for what remains of decent conservatism. I was on a stairmaster at a gym, slack-jawed at her proud defense of calling someone a 'faggot' on the same stage as presidential candidates and as an icon of today's conservative movement. (Click for frequent words.I watched Ann Coulter last night in the gayest way I could.

Slack jawed fagots