From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 08/22/02-10:48:02 PM Z
On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Steve Shapiro wrote:
> is from Dickens' "Oliver Twist." In the story was a bad guy named Fagon,
> hense the term for a 'bad dude,' a fagon; and he was prone to "take pleasure
Steve dear, as I recall, the man from Oliver Twist was "Fagin," and
whatever the origin of the name was supposed to be, he was heinous and a
Jew. I don't relate either especially to gum printing, tho alt photo does
embrace many types.
As for the term faggot, oh good grief -- I live in the heart of faggot
country and I promise the term is part of ordinary parlance -- whether of
endearment or disparagement is not necessarily ordained (just like the
N-word)....
The way I used it was EXACTLY the way it would have been used by the jock
students, or the Irish boy who sat on the counter on the last day of class
and expressed his wonderment. He'd been praised in the last crit for some
truly elegant gums and said quietly, looking down, shaking his head from
side to side: "I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it, but
finally I did it .... and .... I LIKED IT !
Times change however... in later years, even the fellas were interested in
gum printing without embarrassment or inhibition. We also had students
expressing their affective preferences in art, often art of a very high
caliber. However a friend of mine mentioned just the other day that she'd
had a student doing art about his gay life, but it was pulling teeth to
get any of the class to talk about the content. She kept saying, "but what
is it ABOUT", and they would only say something on the order of, um, it's
a panorama.
> in taking a stick from a packet of faggots and beating the bare buttocks of
> one pretty little boy or another." Hense, the term for taking pleasure of
> one little boy upon another was to call them a faggot.
Be that as it may, to have said "sissy" in the context would have been to
emasculate the language. I point out also that this is 2002 and a half.
The NY Times has just announced that it's going to report "same sex
commitment ceremonies" in the same sections & manner as its wedding
announcements. I recently heard a radio interview about the term
"faggot"... and discovered to my surprise how far meaning of the word has
drifted, varying with the social stratum as well as age of the user. (An
off topic topic to be sure, but worth noting.)
cheers,
Judy
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