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. “My Spotify wrapped: You’re a depressed f*ggot aren’t you,” tweeted someone who might have been listening to too much Ariana Grande. A low-res clip from 2009 of Tyra Banks exclaiming “Get the fag off the TV. I’m not watching that!” was being posted in response to peak-gay things, such as a fan asking the alt-pop star Charli XCX to sign their douche. After a character on the Comedy Central cable show The Other Two delivered the immortal line “I’m gagging for you, faggot!”, the outrageous phrase became a shockingly popular meme.

“I am GAGGING for you, faggot” pic.twitter.com/cHpPL8xYzQ — Tom Zohar (@TomZohar) April 4, 2019

Once I saw these playful uses of the word, I started to notice other ones everywhere. In New York, the event organizer Ladyfag’s parties had become synonymous with a trendy night out. The alt-queer magazine Cakeboy promoted “disruptive faggotry”. My gay male friends began throwing the word around to signal their camaraderie. It became clear to me that something larger was happening in cosmopolitan LGBTQ+ communities: queer men were reclaiming faggot.

“For a person to use a word that once scared them and inhabit its power, what it really says is: ‘I’m not scared of you anymore or this word,’” says the queer sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who in the 1990s began each of his columns with the salutation “Hey Faggot” to great controversy. This gives the word a powerful political dimension. “‘Faggot’ is the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the hetero establishment,” Alexander Cheves recently wrote for the LGBTQ+ magazine Advocate. “A term used by queer men who celebrate their sex.” Saying fag often makes straight people uncomfortable, allowing queer people to take up space that was previously denied them. It also serves as a reminder that queer people are still a persecuted minority – a fact that gets lost amid a growing commodification of queer culture, with the rainbow-decked Converse sneakers sold during Pride Month or bevy of queer faces in Taylor Swift’s You Need to Calm Down video.

In fact, we’re in a moment when feminized male queerness – aka what stereotypically gets labeled as “faggotry” – has found greater acceptance and representation in popular culture. The South African-born Australian pop singer Troye Sivan is prancing around in couture dresses in his music videos, Lil Nas X blurs traditional gender lines with his show-stopping red-carpet looks, and the “ball” culture of maximalist drag pageants is glamorized in Pose, FX’s show about the 1990s voguing movement. In 2020, at last, it has become more acceptable to lean into queer forms of self-expression. But “faggot” still feels subversive, even when queerness no longer does.

One of the main sources of this subversive power is queer male sexuality. Savage says that the word has long been popular behind closed doors: “If someone is saying fag, they’re probably saying it to someone they’re fucking.” The word is an important element in kink culture, which commonly includes sadomasochistic behavior such as bullying during sex. “Gay men have a terror that we associate with our early sexual awakenings – it felt like our bodies were betraying us when we were younger,” Savage explained. “You see gay men try to put themselves back in that state of fear and dread: the link between sexual response and fear is strong.”

Despite its power, or maybe because of it, for a long time I wasn’t sure that I could reclaim the word faggot. It got caught in my throat every time I tried to say it; I hated how clunky and ugly the syllables sound and what they used to represent. As a black queer male, I can blare out the n-word in casual conversation with another black person way easier than I can “faggot” during a conversation with a queer guy. That’s probably because I’ve heard the n-word rapped – in multiple forms and contexts – for years. The more I heard the word, the less fearful of it I became. (The popularity of the -ga version versus the -er makes a world of difference. Fag has not received a lighter, more colloquial edit.)

There’s still an alarm that sounds off in my brain whenever I hear “faggot”. For all my ducking and diving of the slur, I have been called it before. The first time it happened, I felt as if I had been spit on. I was 15 and trying to stand up to this jockish country boy who had pulled a cruel joke on me. “Leave me alone, faggot,” he yelled, loud enough for the entire class to hear. I shut up and ran back to my desk, my body hot with embarrassment. My anger had been silenced with one word.

When I hear my fellow queers throwing around “faggot” today, my head jerks back just a bit; I grow hot with anger; I want to yell “Shut up!” like I wish I had at 15. But I also want to reclaim my power from that high school bully by taking back power over the word.