Bad Words

How one “bad word” shaped my earliest sense of self and sex.

I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.

This is one of my more personal essays—written only for subscribers.

Heads up: these can sometimes include explicit content or emotionally triggering subjects.

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At thirteen, I climbed a live oak tree in the backyard of the old farmhouse and said the word “gay.” I knew no one could hear me—my parents were off somewhere else, out of earshot.

And I was high in the tree, a lifelong good climber. Even so, I had done a bad thing, a sin, so I looked around, still scared of getting in trouble, scared of being heard. I believe now that this is how words emerge and how identities are formed. Saying “gay” felt transgressive and treacherous. And, boy, it still does.

In that moment, in the tree, it was not a confession. I just wanted to hear it out loud, hear my mouth make the sounds. I knew it wasn’t the same thing as saying a curse word, like “shit” or “damn”—its status as a social wrong, a forbidden thing, was murkier. But as a child, I could not say precisely why this was so.

I was too young to grasp that it was a dirty word of the ideological sort, not a swear word, but something more dangerous. It wasn’t “damn” but described someone damned. It wasn’t “shit” but described a man who played in shit, or so guys in my class liked to joke. It described a menace, a monster; more than a dirty word, it was a dirty person.

When I was growing up, adults punished kids for using foul language. But calling someone “gay” on the playground wasn’t expressly punished, and I wonder now if this was because the word technically named a type of person that did exist in the world. Perhaps even the homophobic adults who populated my life could reason it was challenging to outlaw a category of person, as difficult as, say, banning the words “black” or “Jewish.” But that didn’t stop church ladies from whispering these words—“I got a black man to come trim my hedges,” they would say, dropping black to a barely-audible whisper. But black and Jewish, though whispered, were still accepted, still allowed. But we all, children and adults alike, had somehow collectively agreed that gay was grotesque and shared in the business of its regulation: calling someone “gay” was the punishment. The crime wasn’t its utterance but whatever one did to deserve being called it.