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chapter three Dude, You’re a Fag Adolescent Male Homophobia The sun shone bright and clear over River High’s annual Creative and Performing Arts Happening, or CAPA. During CAPA the school’s various art programs displayed students’ work in a fairlike atmosphere. The front quad sported student-generated computer programs. Colorful and ornate chalk art covered the cement sidewalks. Tables lined with studentcrafted pottery were set up on the grass. Tall displays of students’ paintings divided the rear quad. To the left of the paintings a television blared student-directed music videos. At the rear of the back quad, a square, roped-off area of cement served as a makeshift stage for drama, choir, and dance performances. Teachers released students from class to wander around the quads, watch performances, and look at the art. This freedom from class time lent the day an air of excitement because students were rarely allowed to roam the campus without a hall pass, an office summons, or a parent/faculty escort. In honor of CAPA, the school district bussed in elementary school students from the surrounding grammar schools to participate in the day’s festivities. Running through the rear quad, Brian, a senior, yelled to a group of boys visiting from the elementary schools, “There’s a faggot over there! There’s a faggot over there! Come look!” Following Brian, the ten-yearolds dashed down a hallway. At the end of the hallway Brian’s friend Dan 52 Dude, You’re a Fag / 53 pursed his lips and began sashaying toward the little boys. As he minced, he swung his hips exaggeratedly and wildly waved his arms. To the boys Brian yelled, “Look at the faggot! Watch out! He’ll get you!” In response, the ten-year-olds raced back down the hallway screaming in terror. Brian and Dan repeated this drama throughout the following half hour, each time with a new group of young boys. Making jokes like these about faggots was central to social life at River High. Indeed, boys learned long before adolescence that faggots were simultaneously predatory and passive and that they were, at all costs, to be avoided. Older boys repeatedly impressed upon younger ones through these types of homophobic rituals that whatever they did, whatever they became, however they talked, they had to avoid becoming a faggot. Feminist scholars of masculinity have documented the centrality of homophobic insults and attitudes to masculinity (Kimmel 2001; Lehne 1998), especially in school settings (Burn 2000; Kimmel 2003; Messner 2005; Plummer 2001; G. Smith 1998; Wood 1984). They argue that homophobic teasing often characterizes masculinity in adolescence and early adulthood and that antigay slurs tend to be directed primarily at gay boys. This chapter both expands on and challenges these accounts of relationships between homophobia and masculinity. Homophobia is indeed a central mechanism in the making of contemporary American adolescent masculinity. A close analysis of the way boys at River High invoke the faggot as a disciplinary mechanism makes clear that something more than simple homophobia is at play in adolescent masculinity. The use of the word fag by boys at River High points to the limits of an argument that focuses centrally on homophobia. Fag is not only an identity linked to homosexual boys but an identity that can temporarily adhere to heterosexual boys as well. The fag trope is also a racialized disciplinary mechanism. Homophobia is too facile a term with which to describe the deployment of fag as an epithet. By calling the use of the word fag homophobia—and letting the argument stop there—previous research has obscured the gendered nature of sexualized insults (Plummer 2001). Invoking homo- 54 / Dude, You’re a Fag phobia to describe the ways boys aggressively tease each other overlooks the powerful relationship between masculinity and this sort of insult. Instead, it seems incidental, in this conventional line of argument, that girls do not harass each other and are not harassed in this same manner. This framing naturalizes the relationship between masculinity and homophobia, thus obscuring that such harassment is central to the formation of a gendered identity for boys in a way that it is not for girls. Fag is not necessarily a static identity attached to a particular (homosexual) boy. Fag talk and fag imitations serve as a discourse with which boys discipline themselves and each other through joking relationships. Any boy can temporarily become a fag in a given social space or interaction. This does not mean that boys who identify as or are perceived to be homosexual aren’t subject to intense harassment. Many are. But becoming a fag has as much to do with failing at the masculine tasks of competence, heterosexual prowess, and strength or in any way revealing weakness or femininity as it does with a sexual identity. This fluidity of the fag identity is what makes the specter of the fag such a powerful disciplinary mechanism. It is fluid enough that boys police their behaviors out of fear of having the fag identity permanently adhere and definitive enough so that boys recognize a fag behavior and strive to avoid it. An analysis of the fag discourse also indicates ways in which gendered power works through racialized selves. The fag discourse is invoked differently by and in relation to white boys’ bodies than it is by and in relation to African American boys’ bodies. While certain behaviors put all boys at risk for becoming temporarily a fag, some behaviors can be enacted by African American boys without putting them at risk of receiving the label. The racialized meanings of the fag discourse suggest that something more than simple homophobia is involved in these sorts of interactions. It is not that gendered homophobia does not exist in African American communities. Indeed, making fun of “negro faggotry seems to be a rite of passage among contemporary black male rappers and filmmakers” (Riggs 1991, 253). However, the fact that “white women and men, gay and straight, have more or less colonized cultural debates about Dude, You’re a Fag / 55 sexual representation” ( Julien and Mercer 1991, 167) obscures varied systems of sexualized meanings among different racialized ethnic groups (Almaguer 1991). Thus far male homophobia has primarily been written about as a racially neutral phenomenon. However, as D. L. King’s (2004) recent work on African American men and same-sex desire pointed out, homophobia is characterized by racial identities as well as sexual and gendered ones. WHAT IS A FAG? GENDERED MEANINGS “Since you were little boys you’ve been told, ‘Hey, don’t be a little faggot,’ ” explained Darnell, a football player of mixed African American and white heritage, as we sat on a bench next to the athletic field. Indeed, both the boys and girls I interviewed told me that fag was the worst epithet one guy could direct at another. Jeff, a slight white sophomore, explained to me that boys call each other fag because “gay people aren’t really liked over here and stuff.” Jeremy, a Latino junior, told me that this insult literally reduced a boy to nothing, “To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that’s like saying that you’re nothing.” Most guys explained their or others’ dislike of fags by claiming that homophobia was synonymous with being a guy. For instance, Keith, a white soccer-playing senior, explained, “I think guys are just homophobic.” However, boys were not equal-opportunity homophobes. Several students told me that these homophobic insults applied only to boys and not to girls. For example, while Jake, a handsome white senior, told me that he didn’t like gay people, he quickly added, “Lesbians, okay, that’s good.” Similarly Cathy, a popular white cheerleader, told me, “Being a lesbian is accepted because guys think, ‘Oh that’s cool.’ ” Darnell, after telling me that boys were warned about becoming faggots, said, “They [guys] are fine with girls. I think it’s the guy part that they’re like ewwww.” In this sense it was not strictly homophobia but a gendered homophobia that constituted adolescent masculinity in the culture of River 56 / Dude, You’re a Fag High. It is clear, according to these comments, that lesbians were “good” because of their place in heterosexual male fantasy, not necessarily because of some enlightened approach to same-sex relationships. A popular trope in heterosexual pornography depicts two women engaging in sexual acts for the purpose of male titillation. The boys at River High are not unique in making this distinction; adolescent boys in general dislike gay men more than they dislike lesbians (Baker and Fishbein 1998). The fetishizing of sex acts between women indicates that using only the term homophobia to describe boys’ repeated use of the word fag might be a bit simplistic and misleading. Girls at River High rarely deployed the word fag and were never called fags. I recorded girls uttering fag only three times during my research. In one instance, Angela, a Latina cheerleader, teased Jeremy, a well-liked white senior involved in student government, for not ditching school with her: “You wouldn’t ’cause you’re a faggot.” However, girls did not use this word as part of their regular lexicon. The sort of gendered homophobia that constituted adolescent masculinity did not constitute adolescent femininity. Girls were not called dykes or lesbians in any sort of regular or systematic way. Students did tell me that slut was the worst thing a girl could be called. However, my field notes indicate that the word slut (or its synonym ho) appeared one time for every eight times the word fag appeared. Highlighting the difference between the deployment of gay and fag as insults brings the gendered nature of this homophobia into focus. For boys and girls at River High gay was a fairly common synonym for “stupid.” While this word shared the sexual origins of fag, it didn’t consistently have the skew of gender-loaded meaning. Girls and boys often used gay as an adjective referring to inanimate objects and male or female people, whereas they used fag as a noun that denoted only unmasculine males. Students used gay to describe anything from someone’s clothes to a new school rule that they didn’t like. For instance, one day in auto shop, Arnie pulled out a large older version of a black laptop computer and placed it on his desk. Behind him Nick cried, “That’s a gay laptop! It’s five inches Dude, You’re a Fag / 57 thick!” The rest of the boys in the class laughed at Arnie’s outdated laptop. A laptop can be gay, a movie can be gay, or a group of people can be gay. Boys used gay and fag interchangeably when they referred to other boys, but fag didn’t have the gender-neutral attributes that gay frequently invoked. Surprisingly, some boys took pains to say that the term fag did not imply sexuality. Darnell told me, “It doesn’t even have anything to do with being gay.” Similarly, J. L., a white sophomore at Hillside High (River High’s cross-town rival), asserted, “Fag, seriously, it has nothing to do with sexual preference at all. You could just be calling somebody an idiot, you know?” I asked Ben, a quiet, white sophomore who wore heavy-metal T-shirts to auto shop each day, “What kind of things do guys get called a fag for?” Ben answered, “Anything . . . literally, anything. Like you were trying to turn a wrench the wrong way, ‘Dude, you’re a fag.’ Even if a piece of meat drops out of your sandwich, ‘You fag!’ ” Each time Ben said, “You fag,” his voice deepened as if he were imitating a more masculine boy. While Ben might rightly feel that a guy could be called a fag for “anything . . . literally, anything,” there were actually specific behaviors that, when enacted by most boys, could render them more vulnerable to a fag epithet. In this instance Ben’s comment highlights the use of fag as a generic insult for incompetence, which in the world of River High, was central to a masculine identity. A boy could get called a fag for exhibiting any sort of behavior defined as unmasculine (although not necessarily behaviors aligned with femininity): being stupid or incompetent, dancing, caring too much about clothing, being too emotional, or expressing interest (sexual or platonic) in other guys. However, given the extent of its deployment and the laundry list of behaviors that could get a boy in trouble, it is no wonder that Ben felt a boy could be called fag for “anything.” These nonsexual meanings didn’t replace sexual meanings but rather existed alongside them. One-third (thirteen) of the boys I interviewed told me that, while they might liberally insult each other with the term, they would not direct it at a homosexual peer. Jabes, a Filipino senior, told me, “I actually say it 58 / Dude, You’re a Fag [fag] quite a lot, except for when I’m in the company of an actual homosexual person. Then I try not to say it at all. But when I’m just hanging out with my friends I’ll be like, ‘Shut up, I don’t want you hear you any more, you stupid fag.’ ” Similarly J. L. compared homosexuality to a disability, saying there was “no way” he’d call an actually gay guy a fag because “there’s people who are the retarded people who nobody wants to associate with. I’ll be so nice to those guys, and I hate it when people make fun of them. It’s like, ‘Bro do you realize that they can’t help that?’ And then there’s gay people. They were born that way.” According to this group of boys, gay was a legitimate, or at least biological, identity. There was a possibility, however slight, that a boy could be gay and masculine (Connell 1995). David, a handsome white senior dressed smartly in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, told me, “Being gay is just a lifestyle. It’s someone you choose to sleep with. You can still throw around a football and be gay.” It was as if David was justifying the use of the word fag by arguing that gay men could be men if they tried but that if they failed at it (i.e., if they couldn’t throw a football) then they deserved to be called a fag. In other words, to be a fag was, by definition, the opposite of masculine, whether the word was deployed with sexualized or nonsexualized meanings. In explaining this to me, Jamaal, an African American junior, cited the explanation of the popular rap artist Eminem: “Although I don’t like Eminem, he had a good definition of it. It’s like taking away your title. In an interview they were like, ‘You’re always capping on gays, but then you sing with Elton John.’ He was like ‘I don’t mean gay as in gay.’ ” This is what Riki Wilchins (2003) calls the “Eminem Exception. Eminem explains that he doesn’t call people ‘faggot’ because of their sexual orientation but because they’re weak and unmanly” (72). This is precisely the way boys at River High used the term faggot. While it was not necessarily acceptable to be gay, at least a man who was gay could do other things that would render him acceptably masculine. A fag, by the very definition of the word, could not be masculine. This distinction between fag as an unmasculine and problematic identity and gay as a possibly masculine, although marginalized, sexual iden- Dude, You’re a Fag / 59 tity is not limited to a teenage lexicon; it is reflected in both psychological discourses and gay and lesbian activism. Eve Sedgwick (1995) argues that in contemporary psychological literature homosexuality is no longer a problem for men so long as the homosexual man is of the right age and gender orientation. In this literature a homosexual male must be an adult and must be masculine. Male homosexuality is not pathologized, but gay male effeminacy is. The lack of masculinity is the problem, not the sexual practice or orientation. Indeed, the edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (a key document in the mental health field) that erased homosexuality as a diagnosis in the 1970s added a new diagnosis in its wake: Gender Identity Disorder. According to Sedgwick, the criteria for diagnosis are different for girls and boys. A girl has to actually assert that she is a boy, indicating a psychotic disconnection with reality, whereas a boy need only display a preoccupation with female activities. The policing of boys’ gender orientation and of a strict masculine identity for gay men is also reflected in gay culture itself. The war against fags as the specter of unmasculine manhood appears in gay male personal ads in which men look for “straight-appearing, straight-acting men.” This concern with both straight and gay men’s masculinity not only reflects teenage boys’ obsession with hypermasculinity but also points to the conflict at the heart of the contemporary “crisis of masculinity” being played out in popular, scientific, and educational arenas. BECOMING A FAG: FAG FLUIDITY “The ubiquity of the word faggot speaks to the reach of its discrediting capacity” (Corbett 2001, 4). It’s almost as if boys cannot help shouting it out on a regular basis—in the hallway, in class, or across campus as a greeting. In my fieldwork I was amazed by the way the word seemed to pop uncontrollably out of boys’ mouths in all kinds of situations.1 To quote just one of many instances from my field notes: two boys walked out of the PE locker room, and one yelled, “Fucking faggot!” at no one in particular. None of the other students paid them any mind, since this 60 / Dude, You’re a Fag sort of thing happened so frequently. Similar spontaneous yelling of some variation of the word fag, seemingly apropos of nothing, happened repeatedly among boys throughout the school. This and repeated imitations of fags constitute what I refer to as a “fag discourse.” Fag discourse is central to boys’ joking relationships. Joking cements relationships among boys (Kehily and Nayak 1997; Lyman 1998) and helps to manage anxiety and discomfort (Freud 1905). Boys both connect with one another and manage the anxiety around this sort of relationship through joking about fags. Boys invoked the specter of the fag in two ways: through humorous imitation and through lobbing the epithet at one another. Boys at River High imitated the fag by acting out an exaggerated “femininity” and/or by pretending to sexually desire other boys. As indicated by the introductory vignette in which an older boy imitated a predatory fag to threaten little boys, male students at River High linked these performative scenarios with a fag identity. They also lobbed the fag epithet at each other in a verbal game of hot potato, each careful to deflect the insult quickly by hurling it toward someone else. These games and imitations made up a fag discourse that highlighted the fag not as a static but rather as a fluid identity that boys constantly struggled to avoid. In imitative performances the fag discourse functioned as a constant reiteration of the fag’s existence, affirming that the fag was out there; boys reminded themselves and each other that at any moment they could become fags if they were not sufficiently masculine. At the same time these performances demonstrated that the boy who was invoking the fag was not a fag. Emir, a tall, thin African American boy, frequently imitated fags to draw laughs from other students in his introductory drama class. One day Mr. McNally, the drama teacher, disturbed by the noise outside the classroom, turned to the open door, saying, “We’ll shut this unless anyone really wants to watch sweaty boys playing basketball.” Emir lisped, “I wanna watch the boys play!” The rest of the class cracked up at his imitation. No one in the class actually thought Emir was gay, as he purposefully mocked both same-sex sexual desire (through pretending to admire the boys playing basketball) and an effeminate gender identity Dude, You’re a Fag / 61 (through speaking with a lisp and in a high-pitched voice). Had he said this in all seriousness, the class most likely would have responded in stunned silence. Instead, Emir reminded them he was masculine by immediately dropping the fag act. After imitating a fag, boys assure others that they are not a fag by instantly becoming masculine again after the performance. They mock their own performed femininity and/or samesex desire, assuring themselves and others that such an identity deserves derisive laughter. Boys consistently tried to force others into the fag position by lobbing the fag epithet at each other. One day in auto shop, Jay was rummaging through a junk-filled car in the parking lot. He poked his head out of the trunk and asked, “Where are Craig and Brian?” Neil responded with “I think they’re over there,” pointing, then thrusting his hips and pulling his arms back and forth to indicate that Craig and Brian might be having sex. The boys in auto shop laughed. This sort of joke temporarily labeled both Craig and Brian as faggots. Because the fag discourse was so familiar, the other boys immediately understood that Neil was indicating that Craig and Brian were having sex. However, these were not necessarily identities that stuck. Nobody actually thought Craig and Brian were homosexuals. Rather, the fag identity was fluid— certainly an identity that no boy wanted but that most boys could escape, usually by engaging in some sort of discursive contest to turn another boy into a fag. In this way the fag became a hot potato that no boy wanted to be left holding. One of the best ways to move out of the fag position was to thrust another boy into that position. For instance, soon after Neil made the joke about Brian having sex with Craig, Brian lobbed the fag epithet at someone else, deflecting it from himself, by initiating a round of a favorite game in auto shop, the “cock game.” Brain said quietly, looking at Josh, “Josh loves the cock,” then slightly louder, “Josh loves the cock.” He continued saying this until he was yelling, “JOSH LOVES THE COCK!” The rest of the boys laughed hysterically as Josh slunk away, saying, “I have a bigger dick than all you motherfuckers!” These two in- 62 / Dude, You’re a Fag stances show how the fag could be mapped, for a moment, onto one boy’s body and how he, in turn, could attach it to another boy, thus deflecting it from himself. In the first instance Neil made fun of Craig and Brian for simply hanging out together. In the second instance Brian went from being a fag to making Josh into a fag through the “cock game.” Through joking interactions boys moved in and out of the fag identity by discursively creating another as a fag. Given the pervasiveness of fag jokes and the fluidity of the fag identity, it is difficult for boys to consistently avoid the brand. As Ben stated, it almost seemed that a boy could get called a fag for “anything.” But most readily acknowledged that there were spaces, behaviors, and bodily comportments that made one more likely to be subject to the fag discourse, such as bodily practices involving clothing and dancing. According to boys at River, fags cared about the style of their clothes, wore tighter clothes, and cared about cleanliness. Nils explained to me that he could tell that a guy was a fag by the way he dressed: “Most guys wear loose-fitting clothing, just kind of baggy. They [fags] wear more tight clothes. More fashionable, I guess.” Similarly, nonfags were not supposed to care about dirtying their clothes. Auto shop was a telling example of this. Given that the boys spent two hours working with greasy car parts, they frequently ended up smudged and rumpled by the end of class. While in the front of the classroom there was a room boys could change in, most of them opted not to change out of their school clothes, with a few modifying their outfits by taking their shirts off and walking around in their “beaters.” These tank tops were banned at River High because of their association with gang membership. Auto shop was the one place on campus where boys could wear them with impunity. Like most of the boys in auto shop, Ben never changed out of his jeans or heavy-metal T-shirts. After working on a particularly oily engine he walked in to the classroom with grease stains covering his pants. He looked down at them, made a face, and walked toward me laughing, waving his hands around with limp wrists, and lisping in a high-pitched singsong voice, “I got my good panths all dirty!” Ben’s imitation indicated Dude, You’re a Fag / 63 that only a fag would actually care about getting his clothes dirty. “Real” guys didn’t care about their appearance; thus it didn’t matter if they were covered in grease stains. Of course, to not care about one’s clothes, or to make fun of those who care about their clothes, ironically, is to also care about one’s appearance. In this sense, masculinity became the carefully crafted appearance of not caring about appearance. Indeed, the boys’ approach to clothing and cleanliness mirrored trends in larger society and the ascendance of the “metrosexual.” Metrosexual is the recently coined label for straight men who care about their appearance, meticulously piecing together outfits, using product in their hair, and even making manicure appointments (for clear polish, of course). Because these sorts of grooming practices are associated with gay men, straight men developed a new moniker to differentiate themselves from other straight men and from gay men. Dancing was another practice that put a boy at risk of being labeled a fag. Often boys would jokingly dance together to diffuse the sexualized and feminized meanings embedded in dancing. At dances white boys frequently held their female dates tightly, locking their hips together. The boys never danced with one another unless they were joking or trying to embarrass one another. The examples of boys jokingly dancing together are too numerous to discuss, but the following example was particularly memorable. Lindy danced behind her date, Chris. Chris’s friend Matt walked up and nudged Lindy aside, imitating her dance moves behind Chris. As Matt rubbed his hands up and down Chris’s back, Chris turned around and jumped back, startled to see Matt there instead of Lindy. Matt cracked up as Chris turned red and swore at his friend. A similar thing happened at CAPA as two of the boys from the band listened to another band play swing music. These two boys walked toward each other and began to ballroom-dance. Within a second or two they keeled over in laughter, hitting each other and moving away. This ritualized dance, moving closer and then apart, happened again and again when music played at River High. Boys participated in this ritualized exchange to emphasize that indeed they weren’t fags. 64 / Dude, You’re a Fag When boys were forced to dance with one another, as in classroom activities, this sort of joking escalated. In the drama class Mr. McNally walked the students through an exercise that required them to stand so close to each other that most parts of their bodies touched. He instructed the students to stand in two circles on the stage, with each person on the outer circle directly behind someone in the inner circle. He began to play a haunting instrumental song with no vocals. As the song continued Mr. McNally told the students in the inner circle to close their eyes and let their bodies go limp, while still standing. He instructed the students in the outer circle to move the person in front through an interpretive dance, following his lead as he moved the student in front of him. As the music continued, most of the students in the outer circle watched Mr. McNally’s movements intently, trying their best to mirror his actions. The result was an intimate and beautiful puppet-and-puppeteer–like dance with the student in back moving the student in front through slow, fluid poses. Instead of following Mr. McNally’s movements like the rest of the class, one pair of white sophomores, Liam and Jacob, barely touched. Jacob stood in back of Liam and, instead of gently holding Liam’s wrist with their full arms touching as the other students did, picked up Liam’s wrist with two fingers as if picking up something repulsive and flung Liam’s hand to its destination. He made jokes with Liam’s arm, repeatedly flinging it up against Liam’s chest in a movement that indicated Liam was “retarded.” The jokes continued as the students switched places, so that the inner circle became the outer circle, with Liam now “in control” of Jacob. Liam placed Jacob’s hand against his forehead as if saluting, made his arms flap like birds, and used Jacob’s finger to poke at his eyes, all the while, unlike the other students, never letting the majority of his body touch Jacob’s. At the end of the exercise Mr. McNally asked for the students’ feedback. One of the girls said, a little embarrassed, “I hate to say it, but it was almost sexual.” To which Mr. McNally responded, “Yeah, it’s full physical contact,” at which point Liam and Jacob took two steps apart from one another. Even though the entire class was assigned to touch one another simultaneously, Jacob and Dude, You’re a Fag / 65 Liam had a hard time following the instructions because it was so dangerous to actually “dance” together like this. Even in a class situation, in the most nonsuspect of interactions, the fag discourse ran deep, forbidding boys to touch one another. The constant threat of the fag regulated boys’ attitudes toward their bodies in terms of clothing, dancing, and touching. Boys constantly engaged in repudiatory rituals to avoid permanently inhabiting the fag position. Boys’ interactions were composed of competitive joking through which they interactionally created the constitutive outside and affirmed their positions as subjects. EMBODYING THE FAG: RICKY’S STORY Through verbal jockeying, most boys at River continually moved in and out of the fag position. For the one boy who permanently inhabited the fag position, life at River High was not easy. I heard about Ricky long before I met him. As soon as I talked to any student involved with drama, the choir, or the Gay/Straight Alliance, they told me I had to meet Ricky. Ricky, a lithe, white junior with a shy smile and downcast eyes, frequently sported multicolored hair extensions, mascara, and sometimes a skirt. An extremely talented dancer, he often starred in the school’s dance shows and choreographed assemblies. In fact, he was the male lead in “I’ve Had the Time of My Life,” the final number in the dance show. Given how important other students thought it was that I speak to him, I was surprised that I had to wait for nearly a year before he granted me an interview. His friends had warned me that he was “heterophobic” and as a result was reluctant to talk to authority figures he perceived were heterosexual. After I heard his stories of past and present abuse at the hands of negligent adults, cruel teenagers, and indifferent school administrators, I understood why he would be leery of folks asking questions about his feelings, experiences, and opinions. While other boys at River High engaged in continual repudiatory rituals around the fag identity, Ricky embodied the fag because of his homosexuality and his less normative gender identification and self-presentation. 66 / Dude, You’re a Fag Ricky assumed (rightly so in this context) that other people immediately identified him with his sexuality. He told me that when he first met people, “they’ll be like, ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure.’ And they say, ‘Are you gay?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeeeaahh.’ ‘Okay, can I ask you another question?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure.’ And they’ll go, ‘Does it hurt?’ It always goes . . . ” He rolled his eyes dismissively, telling me, “They go straight up to the most personal question! They skip everything else. They go straight to that. Sometimes I’ll get the occasional ‘Well, how did you know that you were [gay]?’ ” He answered with “For me it’s just always been there. I knew from the time I could think for myself on. It was pretty obvious,” he concluded gesturing to his thin frame and tight-fitting tank top with a flourish. Ricky lived at the margins of school, student social life, and society in general. His mother died when he was young. After her death, he moved around California and Nevada, alternately living with his drug-addicted father, a boyfriend’s family, his aunt, his sister, and his homophobic grandmother (who forbade him to wear nail polish or makeup). The resulting discontinuities in his education proved difficult in terms of both academics and socialization: It’s really hard to go to a school for a period of time and get used to their system and everything’s okay. Then when all of a sudden you have to pick up and move the next week, get into a new environment you have no idea about, you don’t know how the kids are gonna react to you. You don’t know what the teachers are like and you don’t know what their system is. So this entire time I have not been able to get used to their system and get used to the environment at all. That’s why I had to say, “Fuck it,” cause for so long I’ve been going back and going back and reviewing things I did in like fifth grade. I’m at a fourth-grade math level. I am math illiterate, let me tell you. In addition to the continual educational disruptions, Ricky had to contend with intense harassment. Figuring out the social map of the school was central to Ricky’s survival. Homophobic harassment at the hands of teachers and students characterized his educational experience. When he Dude, You’re a Fag / 67 was beat up in a middle school PE class, the teacher didn’t help but rather fostered this sort of treatment: They gave them a two-day suspension and they kind of kept an eye on me. That’s all they could do. The PE coach was very racist and very homophobic. He was just like “faggot this” and “faggot that.” I did not feel comfortable in the locker room and I asked him if I could go somewhere else to change, and he said, “No, you can change here.” Sadly, by the time Ricky had reached River High he had become accustomed to the violence. In a weird sense, in a weird way, I’m comfortable with it because it’s just what I’ve known for as long as I can remember. I mean, in elementary school, I’m talking like sixth grade, I started being called a fag. Fifth grade I was called a fag. Third grade I was called a fag. I have the paperwork, ’cause my mom kept everything, I still have them, of kids harassing me, saying “Gaylord,” at that time it was “Gaylord.” Contrary to the protestations of boys earlier in the chapter that they would never call someone who was gay a fag, Ricky experienced this harassment on a regular basis, probably because he couldn’t draw on identifiably masculine markers such as athletic ability or other forms of dominance to bolster some sort of claim on masculinity. Hypermasculine environments such as sporting events continued to be venues of intense harassment at River High. “I’ve had water balloons thrown at me at a football game. Like, we [his friends Genevieve and Lacy] couldn’t have stayed at the homecoming game. We had to go.” The persecution began immediately at the biggest football game of the year. When he entered with his friend Lacy, “Two guys that started walking up to get tickets said, ‘There’s the fucking fag.’ ” When Ricky responded with “Excuse me?” the boy shot back, “Don’t talk to me like you know me.” The boy and his friends started to threaten Ricky. Ricky said, “He started getting into my face, and his friends started saying, ‘Come on, man, come on, man’ ” as if they were about to hit Ricky. Ricky felt frustrated that “the ticket people are sitting there not doing a damn thing. 68 / Dude, You’re a Fag This is right in front of them!” He found Ms. Chesney, the vice principal, after the boys finally left. While Ms. Chesney told him, “We’ll take care of it,” Ricky said he never heard about the incident again. Later at the game he and Lacy had water bottles thrown at them by young boys yelling, “Oh look, it’s a fag!” He said that this sentiment echoed as they tried to sit in the bleachers to watch the half-time show, which he had choreographed: “Left and right, ‘What the fuck is that fag doing here?’ ‘That fag has no right to be here.’ Blah blah blah. That’s all I heard. I tried to ignore it. And after a while I couldn’t take it and then we just went home.” While many of the boys I interviewed said they would not actually harass a gay boy, that was not Ricky’s experience. He was driven out of the event he had choreographed because of the intense homophobic harassment. Ricky endured similar torment at CAPA, the event at which Brian and Dan socialized the young boys to fear faggots by chasing them. Boys reacted with revulsion to Ricky’s dance performances while simultaneously objectifying the girls dancing on the stage. The rear quad served as the stage for CAPA’s dancers. The student body clustered around the stage to watch the all-female beginning jazz dance class perform. Mitch, a white senior, whose shirt read, “One of us is thinking about sex. It must be me,” muttered, “This is so gay” and began to walk away. Jackson yelled after him, “Where are you going, fag?” As Mitch walked away, Jackson turned back to the dancing girls, who now had their backs to the boys, gyrating their behinds in time to the music, and shouted, “Shake that ass!” Jackson reached in his pocket to grab his glasses. Pablo commented, “He’s putting on his glasses so he can see her shake her ass better.” Watching the girls’ behinds, Jackson replied, as he pointed to one of them, “She’s got a huge ass.” Mitch turned to Pablo and asked, seriously, “Why are there no guys?” Pablo responded, “You’re such a fag.” The advanced dance troupe took the stage with Ricky in the center. Again, all the dancers sported black outfits, but this time the pants were baggy and the shirts fitted. Ricky wore the same outfit as the girls. He danced in the “lead” position, in the front and the center of the dance for- Dude, You’re a Fag / 69 mation. He executed the same dance moves as the girls, which is uncommon in mixed-gender dance troupes. Usually the boys in a mixedgender dance troupe perform the more “physical” moves such as flips, holding up the girls, and spinning them around. Ricky, instead, performed all the sexually suggestive hip swivels, leg lifts, arm flares, and spins that the girls did. Nils and his group of white male friends made faces and giggled as they stared at Ricky. Soon Nils turned to Malcolm and said, “It’s like a car wreck, you just can’t look away.” Both shook their heads in dismay as they continued to watch the “car wreck” with what can only be described as morbid absorption. Other boys around the stage reacted visibly, recoiling at Ricky’s performance. One of them, J. R., a hulking junior and captain of the football team, shook his head and muttered under his breath, “That’s disgusting.” I asked him, “What?” J. R. turned to me with his nose wrinkled in revulsion and responded, “That guy dancing, it’s just disgusting! Disgusting!” He again shook his head as he walked off. Soon afterward an African American boy turned to his friend and admiringly said of Ricky, “He’s a better dancer than all the girls! That takes talent!” He turned to me and said, “Can I wiggle my hips that fast?” and laughed as he tried. The white boys’ revulsion bordering on violence was common for boys when talking about Ricky and his dancing. More surprising was the African American boys’ admiration, if tinged with humor, of these skills. In these moments boys faced a terrifying, embodied abject, not just some specter of a fag. Even though dancing was the most important thing in his life, Ricky told me he didn’t attend school dances because he didn’t like to “watch my back” the whole time. Meanings of sexuality and masculinity were deeply embedded in dancing and high school dances. Several boys at the school told me that they wouldn’t even attend a dance if they knew Ricky was going to be there. In auto shop, Brad, a white sophomore, said, “I heard Ricky is going in a skirt. It’s a hella short one!” Chad responded, “I wouldn’t even go if he’s there.” Topping Chad’s response, Brad claimed, “I’d probably beat him up outside.” K. J. agreed: “He’d proba- 70 / Dude, You’re a Fag bly get jumped by a bunch of kids who don’t like him.” Chad said, “If I were a gay guy I wouldn’t go around telling everyone.” All of them agreed on this. Surprised and somewhat disturbed by this discussion, I asked incredulously, “Would you really not go to prom because a gay guy would be in the same room as you all?” They looked at me like I had two heads and said again that of course they wouldn’t. Ricky’s presentation of both sexual preference and gender identity was so profoundly threatening that boys claimed they would be driven to violence. Ricky developed different strategies to deal with the fag discourse, given that he was not just a fag but the fag. While other boys lobbed the epithet at one another with implied threats of violence (you are not a man and I am, so watch out), for Ricky that violence was more a reality than a threat. As a result, learning the unwritten rules of a particular school and mapping out its social and physical landscape was literally a matter of survival. He found River High to be one of the most homophobic schools he had attended: “It’s the most violent school I think that I’ve seen so far. With all the schools the verbal part about, you know the slang, ‘the fag,’ the ‘fuckin’ freak,’ ‘fucking fag,’ all that stuff is all the same. But this is the only school that throws water bottles, throws rocks, and throws food, ketchup, sandwiches, anything of that nature.”2 While there is a law in California protecting students from discrimination based on sexual identity, when Ricky requested help from school authorities he was ignored, much as in his interaction with the vice principal at the homecoming game. Ricky responded to this sort of treatment with several evasion strategies. He walked with his eyes downcast to avoid meeting other guys’ eyes, fearing that they would regard eye contact as a challenge or an invitation to a fight. Similarly he varied his route to and from school: I had to change paths about three different times walking to school. The same people who drive the same route know, ’cause I guess they leave at the same time, so they’re always checking something out. But I’m always prepared with a rock just in case. I have a rock in my hand so if anything happens I just chuck one back. I always walk with something like that. Dude, You’re a Fag / 71 Indeed, when I was driving him home from the interview that day, boys on the sidewalk glared at him and made comments I couldn’t hear. He also, with the exception of the homecoming football game, avoided highly sexualized or masculinized school events where he might be subject to violence. Soon after my research ended, Ricky dropped out of River High and moved to a nearby city to perform in local drag shows. While other boys moved in and out of the fag position, Ricky’s gendered practices and sexual orientation forced him to bear all that the other boys cast out of masculinity. His double transgression of sexual and gender identity made his position at River High simply unlivable. The lack of protection from the administration meant facing torture on a daily basis. The abuse that was heaped on him was more than one person, certainly more than one parentless, undereducated, sweet, artistic adolescent, could bear.3 R ACIA LIZING THE FAG While all groups of boys, with the exception of the Mormon boys, used the word fag or fag imagery in their interactions, the fag discourse was not deployed consistently or identically across social groups at River High. Differences between white boys’ and African American boys’ meaning making, particularly around appearance and dancing, reveal ways the specter of the fag was racialized. The specter of the fag, these invocations reveal, was consistently white. Additionally, African American boys simply did not deploy it with the same frequency as white boys. For both groups of boys, the fag insult entailed meanings of emasculation, as evidenced by Darnell’s earlier comment. However, African American boys were much more likely to tease one another for being white than for being a fag. Precisely because African American men are so hypersexualized in the United States, white men are, by default, feminized, so white was a stand-in for fag among many of the African American boys at River High. Two of the behaviors that put a white boy at risk for being labeled a fag didn’t function in the same way for African American boys. 72 / Dude, You’re a Fag Perhaps because they are, by necessity, more invested in symbolic forms of power related to appearance (much like adolescent girls), a given African American boy’s status is not lowered but enhanced by paying attention to clothing or dancing. Clean, oversized, carefully put together clothing is central to a hip-hop identity for African American boys who identify with hip-hop culture. Richard Majors (2001) calls this presentation of self a “cool pose” consisting of “unique, expressive and conspicuous styles of demeanor, speech, gesture, clothing, hairstyle, walk, stance and handshake,” developed by African American men as a symbolic response to institutionalized racism (211). Pants are usually several sizes too big, hanging low on the hips, often revealing a pair of boxers beneath. Shirts and sweaters are similarly oversized, sometimes hanging down to a boy’s knees. Tags are frequently left on baseball hats worn slightly askew and perched high on the head. Meticulously clean, unlaced athletic shoes with rolled-up socks under the tongue complete a typical hip-hop outfit. In fact, African American men can, without risking a fag identity, sport styles of self and interaction frequently associated with femininity for whites, such as wearing curlers (Kelley 2004). These symbols, at River High, constituted a “cool pose.” The amount of attention and care given to clothing for white boys not identified with hip-hop culture (that is, most of the white boys at River High) would certainly cast them into an abject, fag position, as Ben indicated when he cried, jokingly, “I got my good panths all dirty!” White boys were not supposed to appear to care about their clothes or appearance because only fags cared about how they looked. However African American boys involved in hip-hop culture talked frequently about whether their clothes, specifically their shoes, were dirty. In drama class both Darnell and Marc compared their white Adidas basketball shoes. Darnell mocked Marc because black scuff marks covered his shoes, asking incredulously, “Yours are a week old and they’re dirty, I’ve had mine for a month and they’re not dirty!” Both laughed. Monte, River High’s star football player, echoed this concern about dirty shoes. Looking at the fancy red shoes he had lent to his cousin the week before, he told me Dude, You’re a Fag / 73 he was frustrated because after his cousin used them the “shoes are hella scuffed up.” Clothing, for these boys, did not indicate a fag position but rather defined membership in a certain cultural and racial group (Perry 2002). Especially for poor African American boys (as most were at River High), clean clothing was an indicator of class status. If one had enough money to have clean shoes one was not “ghetto,” in the parlance of the students at River. As in many places in the United States, racial divisions in Riverton line up relatively easily with class divisions. Darnell grabbed me at lunch one day to point this out to me, using school geography as an example. He sauntered up and whispered in my ear, “Notice the separation? There’s the people who hang out in there (pointing toward the cafeteria), the people who hang out in the quad. And then the people who leave.” He smashed one hand against the other in frustration: “I talk to these people in class. Outside we all separate into our groups. We don’t talk to each other. Rich people are not here. They got cars and they go out.” He told me that the “ball players” sat in the cafeteria. And he was right: there were two tables at the rear of the cafeteria populated by African American boys on the basketball and football teams, the guys whom Darnell described to me as his “friends.” He said there were “people who leave, people who stay and the people over there [in the quad]. The people who stay are ghetto.” He added, “Ghetto come to mean ‘niggerish.’ That reflects people who are poor or urban.” Carl and his friend James, both African American basketball players, were also clear about the ways race lined up with class at River: “White people always take us to lunch cause black people don’t have cars.” Because African American boys lacked other indicators of class such as cars and the ability to leave campus during lunch, clean expensive basketball shoes took on added symbolic status. Dancing was another arena that carried distinctly fag-associated meanings for white boys but masculine meanings for African American boys who participated in hip-hop culture. White boys often associated dancing with fags. However, dancing did not carry this sort of sexualized 74 / Dude, You’re a Fag gender meaning for all boys at River High. For African American boys dancing demonstrates membership in a cultural community (Best 2000). At River, African American boys frequently danced together in single-sex groups, teaching each other the latest dance moves, showing off a particularly difficult move, or making each other laugh with humorous dance moves. In fact, while in drama class Liam and Jacob hit each other and joked through the entire dancing exercise, Darnell and Marc seemed very comfortable touching one another. They stood close to one another, heel to toe, as they were supposed to. Their bodies touched, and they gently and gracefully moved the other’s arms and head in a way that was tender, not at all like the flailing of the two white boys. Dancing ability actually increased an African American boy’s social status. Students recognized K. J., along with Ricky, as the most talented dancer at the school. K. J. was a sophomore of mixed racial descent, originally from the Philippines, who participated in the hip-hop culture of River High. He continually wore the latest hip-hop fashions. His dark complexion and identification with hip-hop culture aligned him with many of the African American boys at River High. Girls hollered his name as they walked down the hall and thrust love notes folded in complicated designs into his hands as he sauntered to class. For the past two years K. J. had won first place in the talent show for dancing. When he danced at assemblies the auditorium reverberated with screamed chants of “Go K. J.! Go K. J! Go K. J.!” Because dancing for boys of color, especially African American boys, placed them within a tradition of masculinity, they were not at risk of being labeled a fag for engaging in this particular gendered practice. Nobody called K. J. a fag. In fact, in several of my interviews boys of multiple racial/ethnic backgrounds spoke admiringly of K. J.’s dancing abilities. Marco, a troublemaking white senior, said of K. J., “Did you know he invented the Harlem Shake?” referring to a popular and difficult dance move. Like Ricky, K. J. often choreographed assembly dance routines. But unlike Ricky, he frequently starred in them at the homecoming and Mr. Cougar rallies. None of this is to say that participation in dancing made boys less ho- Dude, You’re a Fag / 75 mophobic. K. J. himself was deeply homophobic. But like the other boys, it was a gendered homophobia that had to do with masculine gender transgressions as much as sexuality. His sister, for instance, identified as a lesbian, and he looked up to and liked her. But he loathed Ricky. Because of their involvement with dance, the two came into contact relatively frequently. Stylistically, they mirrored one another. Both sported long hair: K. J.’s in cornrows and Ricky’s lengthened with highlighted extensions. Both wore elaborate outfits: K. J. favored oversized matching red and white checked shorts and a button-down shirt over a white tank top, while Ricky sported baggy black pants, combat boots, and a white tank top. Both were thin with delicate facial features and little facial hair. But the meanings associated with what might seem like gender transgressions by both of them were mediated by their racial and sexual identities, leading to K. J.’s popularity and Ricky’s debasement. K. J.’s appearance identified his style as hip-hop, a black, masculine cultural style, whereas Ricky’s style identified him as gender transgressive and feminine. Not surprisingly, K. J. and Ricky were the stars of the dance show at River High. As the day of the show arrived, K. J. asked me for what must have been the hundredth time if I was planning to attend. He said, “Everyone is sayin’ that Ricky is my competition, but I don’t think so. He’s not my competition.” K. J. continued to tell me that he was very upset with Ricky because the night before at the dress rehearsal Ricky had walked up to him, saying, “Hey, K. J., awesome dance.” Ricky had put his hand on K. J.’s back when he said this. Angry and red, K. J. said to me, “I wanted to hit him hella bad! Then he came up again. I was like ‘Oh My God!’ Ugh!” Trying to identify exactly who Ricky was, another boy said, “I think that’s the same guy who is in our history class. The guy who looks like a girl?” K. J., wanting to make sure the other boys knew how repulsive Ricky was, said, “You know how you look at girls like they are hella fine? That’s how he looks at guys, dude! He could be looking at you!” All the boys groaned. K. J. expressed relief that he was “safe,” saying Ricky “only checks out white guys.” K. J. took pains to differentiate himself from Ricky by saying that Ricky wasn’t his competition and that Ricky 76 / Dude, You’re a Fag didn’t even look at him as a sexual object because of his race. The respect K. J. commanded at River was certainly different from the treatment Ricky received because the meanings associated with African American boys and dancing were not the same as the ones associated with white boys and dancing. K. J.’s dancing ability and carefully crafted outfits bolstered his popularity with both boys and girls, while Ricky’s similar ability and just as carefully chosen outfits placed him, permanently, in a fag position. None of this is to say that the sexuality of boys of color wasn’t policed. In fact, because African American boys were regarded as so hypersexual, in the few instances I documented in which boys were punished for engaging in the fag discourse, African American boys were policed more stringently than white boys. It was as if when they engaged in the fag discourse the gendered insult took on actual combative overtones, unlike the harmless sparring associated with white boys’ deployments. The intentionality attributed to African American boys in their sexual interactions with girls seemed to occur as well in their deployment of the fag discourse. One morning as I waited with the boys on the asphalt outside the weight room for Coach Ramirez to arrive, I chatted with Kevin and Darrell. The all-male, all-white wrestling team walked by, wearing gold and black singlets. Kevin, an African American sophomore, yelled out, “Why are you wearing those faggot outfits? Do you wear those tights with your balls hanging out?” The weight-lifting students stopped their fidgeting and turned to watch the scene unfold. The eight or so members of the wrestling team stopped at their SUV and turned to Kevin. A small redhead whipped around and yelled aggressively, “Who said that?!” Fingers from wrestling team members quickly pointed toward Kevin. Kevin, angrily jumping around, yelled back as he thrust his chest out, “Talk about jumping me, nigger?” He strutted over, advancing toward the small redhead. A large wrestler sporting a cowboy hat tried to block Kevin’s approach. The redhead meanwhile began to jump up and down, as if warming up for a fight. Finally the boy in the cowboy hat pushed Kevin away from the team and they climbed in the truck, while Kevin strutted back to his classmates, muttering, “All they know how to do is pick somebody Dude, You’re a Fag / 77 up. Talk about jumping me . . . weak-ass wrestling team. My little bro could wrestle better than any of those motherfuckers.” It would seem, based on the fag discourse scenarios I’ve described thus far, that this was, in a sense, a fairly routine deployment of the sexualized and gendered epithet. However, at no other time did I see this insult almost cause a fight. Members of the white wrestling team presumably took it so seriously that they reported the incident to school authorities. This in itself is stunning. Boys called each other fag so frequently in everyday discussion that if it were always reported most boys in the school would be suspended or at least in detention on a regular basis. This was the only time I saw school authorities take action based on what they saw as a sexualized insult. As a result Mr. J. explained that somebody from the wrestling team told him that Kevin was “harassing” them. Mr. J. pulled Kevin out of weight-lifting class to discuss the incident. According to him, Kevin “kept mouthing off” and it wasn’t the first time he had been in trouble, so they decided to expel him and send him to Hillside. While Kevin apparently had multiple disciplinary problems and this interaction was part of a larger picture, it is important that this was the only time that I heard any boy (apart from Ricky) tattle on another boy for calling him gay or fag. Similarly it was the only time I saw punishment meted out by the administration. So it seems that, much as in the instance of the Bomb Squad at the Dance Show, intentionality was more frequently attributed to African American boys. They weren’t just engaging in the homophobic bantering to which teachers like Mr. Kellogg turned a blind eye or in which Mr. McNally participated. Rather, they were seen as engaging in actual struggles for dominance by attacking others. Because they were in a precarious economic and social position, the ramifications for African American boys for engaging in the fag discourse were more serious. Precisely because some of them were supposed to be attending, not River High, but the “bad” school, Chicago, in the neighboring school district, when they did encounter trouble their punishment was more severe. 78 / Dude, You’re a Fag WHERE THE FAG DISAPPEARS: DR AMA PERFORMANCES While, for the most part, a boy’s day at River entailed running a gauntlet of competitive and ritualized sexual insults, there were two spaces of escape—the Gay/Straight Alliance and drama performances. Theater productions were not the same as the drama classroom, where I have already indicated that Mr. McNally sometimes drew upon the fag discourse for laughs and to forge rapport with male students. Drama performances typically didn’t involve all of the students in drama classes. Rather, students who were involved were ones who identified as drama students and cared about the theater; some of them envisioned trying to make a career out of it. Drama is notoriously a fag space in high schools. The ironic result of this connection is that the insult disappears. Not only does the insult disappear, but drama becomes a space where male students can enact a variety of gender practices. The opening night of the yearly spring musical illustrates how the fag insult disappeared and male students enacted a variety of gender practices without negative ramifications. Drama students ran around in various stages of costuming and undress in the backstage area of the River High auditorium as they prepared for the opening night of the spring musical, Carousel. As the balmy spring air blew through the stage door, I smiled as I thought back to my high school days and felt that same nervous energy as we prepped for choir concerts and musicals like Fiddler on the Roof. Squealing, giggling, and singing, students frantically searched for spare props, costume parts, and makeup. Students flew past me in clouds of hairspray, carrying parasols or sailor paraphernalia as they readied themselves to perform this relatively dark musical about romantic betrayal, domestic violence, and murder. I leaned against the wall outside the dressing rooms as students costumed themselves and each other. Girls quickly and carefully applied makeup under the bright yellow bulbs. Boys lined up waiting for an available girl to apply makeup. I waited for the inevitable fag comment as the Dude, You’re a Fag / 79 girls plastered rouge, lip gloss, and eye shadow on the boys’ faces. Surprisingly, even though all but one of the boys (Brady) participating in this musical were straight, I heard not a one. Instead Trevor, the handsome blond lead, and the other boys checked out the girls’ handiwork in the surrounding mirrors, suggesting slight changes or thanking them for their help. Squealing with delight at their new look, the boys ran back into the beehive of noise and activity that constituted the backstage area outside the dressing rooms. That reaction and their impromptu singing surprised me as much their pride in sporting makeup. The normally tough and competitive exterior that they displayed in the rest of the school disappeared, and the boys showed as much excitement as the girls did, smiling and giggling as they anticipated their performance. Soon the backstage area quieted down as students took their marks and the orchestra, really a group of four musicians, played the opening bars. Students danced around the stage, depicting a picnic, a fair, and other tableaus of small-town American life in the 1900s. Remarkably, all the students watched or sang a musical number entitled “You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan” without cracking a single joke about fags or homosexuality. This refusal to engage in insults, homophobic comments, or sexist joking continued throughout the evening. Conditioned as I was at this point to hearing the fag discourse, I was stunned at the myriad opportunities to levy the epithet and the seeming refusal by all of these boys, gay and straight, to invoke it. The most striking example of this refusal occurred midway through the play as eight boys dressed as sailors tumbled over each other as they prepared to go on stage. They joked about their lack of “sailorness” as they waited excitedly in the wings. Brady, surveying his fellow soldiers, admonished the boys laughingly to “act like sailors, men!” Jake laughed back in a loud whisper, “Oh yeah, right!” Randy sarcastically said, “We look sooo much like sailors,” puffing out his chest and mock-strutting across the stage. The boys all giggled at this performance. They soon gathered around Brady, who, as part of his effort to appear like a tough sailor, had had his friend draw a temporary tattoo on his hairy bicep. It 80 / Dude, You’re a Fag was a truly sailorlike tattoo, a mermaid. But this mermaid was more a visual pun than anything else because she was not a sultry, buxom siren but Ariel from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid. Brady beamed as he showed it off to everyone. The other boys admired the artwork and remarked, with a tinge of jealousy, that it was a great tattoo. They heard their cue and strutted on stage, eventually forming a semicircle and singing: “Blow high, blow low / Away then we will go / We’ll go away in the sailin’ away / Away we’ll go / Blow me high an’ low.” During the song, boys took their turns performing a short solo dance. Some performed typically masculine moves such as flips or swaggers, while others performed pirouettes or delicate twirls. Sailors, in the contemporary United States, are already laden with all sorts of gay innuendo. From the sailor member of the famous gay disco group the Village People to actual sailors stuck on ships with all-male crews, to jokes about “sea men,” sailors represent a subtext of same-sex desire. So a bunch of sailors jumping around singing a song that relies upon the repeated lyrics “blow me” is pretty funny. However, the boys took an approach to this that was, more than anything, simply playful. Watching this scene unfold, I was surprised that given all of the fag iconography in this moment—sailors, dancing, Disney cartoons, and the repeated singing of the word blow (which by itself can get boys joking for hours)—I didn’t hear a single invocation of the fag discourse. At the end of the night I turned to David and asked why no one uttered the word fag the entire night. He explained, “That’s cause we’re drama freaks.” In a sense, because these boys were near the bottom of the social hierarchy at River High, they were, by default, fags. But I think the lack of the fag discourse during that evening was a more complicated story. The boys had fun with the double entendres and played with masculinity. Brady’s tattoo functioned as a sort of queering of masculinity in which he visually punned by drawing a mermaid who was not so much sexy as a singing heroine for little girls. The theater is a place for all sorts of experimentation, so why not a metaphorical and physical space for Dude, You’re a Fag / 81 gender and sexual experimentation? After watching what boys endured daily at River High, I found this dramatic performance a space of liberation and relaxation. The boys were able to try on gender identities, integrating masculine and feminine gender practices, without fear of being teased. Instead of constantly policing their own and others’ gender displays, they were able to be playful, emotional, and creative. It was as if, because they were in a space where they were all coded as fags anyway and couldn’t be any lower socially, it didn’t matter what they did. Such is the liberatory potential of the theater. These boys had nothing left to lose socially, which meant that, ironically, they were free from the pressures of adolescent masculinity, at least temporarily (though it should be noted here that the boys involved in drama productions weren’t among the most ardent users of the fag discourse, even outside dramatic performances). What they weren’t able to do, however, was to engage in these sorts of playful practices around gender outside the drama performance space. REFR AMING HOMOPHOBIA Homophobia is central to contemporary definitions of adolescent masculinity. Unpacking multilayered meanings that boys deploy through their uses of homophobic language and joking rituals makes clear that it is not just homophobia but a gendered and racialized homophobia. By attending to these meanings, I reframe the discussion as a fag discourse rather than simply labeling it as homophobia. The fag is an “abject” (Butler 1993) position, a position outside masculinity that actually constitutes masculinity. Thus masculinity, in part, becomes the daily interactional work of repudiating the threatening specter of the fag. The fag extends beyond a static sexual identity attached to a gay boy. Few boys are permanently identified as fags; most move in and out of fag positions. Looking at fag as a discourse in addition to a static identity re- 82 / Dude, You’re a Fag veals that the term can be invested with different meanings in different social spaces. Fag may be used as a weapon with which to temporarily assert one’s masculinity by denying it to others. Thus the fag becomes a symbol around which contests of masculinity take place. Researchers who look at the intersection of sexuality and masculinity need to attend to how racialized identities may affect how fag is deployed and what it means in various social situations. While researchers have addressed the ways in which masculine identities are racialized (Bucholtz 1999; Connell 1995; J. Davis 1999; Ferguson 2000; Majors 2001; Price 1999; Ross 1998), they have not paid equal attention to the ways fag might be a racialized epithet. Looking at when, where, and with what meaning fag is deployed provides insight into the processes through which masculinity is defined, contested, and invested in among adolescent boys. Ricky demonstrates that the fag identity can, but doesn’t have to, inhere in a single body. But it seems that he needed to meet two criteria— breaking both gendered and sexual norms—to be constituted as a fag. He was simultaneously the penetrated fag who threatened psychic chaos (Bersani 1987) and the man who couldn’t “throw a football around.” Not only could he not “throw a football,” but he actively flaunted his unmasculine gender identification by dancing provocatively at school events and wearing cross-gendered clothing. Through his gender practices Ricky embodied the threatening specter of the fag. He bore the weight of the fears and anxieties of the boys in the school who frantically lobbed the fag epithet at one another. The fag epithet, when hurled at other boys, may or may not have explicit sexual meanings, but it always has gendered meanings. When a boy calls another boy a fag, it means he is not a man but not necessarily that he is a homosexual. The boys at River High knew that they were not supposed to call homosexual boys fags because that was mean. This, then, has been the limited success of the mainstream gay rights movement. The message absorbed by some of these teenage boys was that “gay men can be masculine, just like you.” Instead of challenging gender inequal- Dude, You’re a Fag / 83 ity, this particular discourse of gay rights has reinscribed it. Thus we need to begin to think about how gay men may be in a unique position to challenge gendered as well as sexual norms. The boys in the drama performances show an alternative way to be teenage boys, which is about playing with gender, not just enforcing gender duality based on sexual meanings. chapter four Compulsive Heterosexuality Masculinity and Dominance The weight room, a freestanding module by the football field, stank with a familiar musty smell of old sweat, metal, and rubber. Colorful diagrams of deltoids, biceps, quads, and other muscle groups adorned the walls. Each day Coach Ramirez, a gentle, soft-spoken man, called roll and told the (mostly male) students to run a lap or two as he entered the module to place his folders in his office and turn on the stereo. After running their laps, the sweaty boys filed in as loud hip-hop music blared from the stereo. Dressed in regulation black gym shorts and T-shirts, boys milled about, picking up weights, completing a few sets, and then moving on to other machines. Some of the African American boys danced to the music, while, inevitably, Josh and his white friends asked for country music. One fall morning, as some of the boys grew tired of lifting, they gathered around a set of benches in the front of the weight room. Reggie, a white rugby-playing junior, asked the gathering group, “Did you hear about the three ‘B’s?’ ” Before anyone had a chance to respond, Reggie announced triumphantly, “Blow job, back massage, and breakfast in bed!” Rich asked skeptically, “Shouldn’t the back massage come first?” The conversation soon turned to the upcoming Winter Ball and their prospects for sex with their dates. Jerome complained that he was not 84
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Adolescent male homophobia
Social circles in River High appeared to be distinctive at first with a clear cut between
faggots and other boys through the adolescence stage. The Strong emphasis from older boys to
the young was that they avoid being fags through observing their actions such as talking and
other activities as well. There has, h...


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