Stay Down, Faggot – IDAHO(T) 2014
To mark IDAHOT 2014, Polari‘s editor recalls the homophobic attack that he and his partner endured on his birthday, the day after IDAHO 2013.
(Click to enlarge)
This is a tale about words. The first words that went through my head, the first sentence I can remember thinking, was, “I wonder when it will end?” I had been kicked in the face for the third time, and only because I tried to look up and see what was happening to my partner, Damon. He had been separated off to one side by three of the six youths who attacked us. The other three had punched me to the ground and pushed me up against the park fence. The one who held me down and repeatedly kicked me in the face was jumpy, emotional, unhinged. Every second word was an expletive. I do not know how, looking back, but I was quiet, calm, rational, and trying to figure out how to bring the situation to a close. I rolled with the kicks and the punches, struggled slowly out of my jacket so they could search through it, and kept my head bowed as they pulled me over to where Damon was being held down. One of the gang, safe beneath his hoodie, leaned in. He told us to stay there for five minutes, to not tell anyone about what happened or he’d kill us. When the pack had fled into the dark recesses of the park, we quietly pulled ourselves to our feet, left by the nearest exit, and walked home in silence.
The attack happened so fast that it was a blur, and it was only when the police arrived at our house that I started piecing it together. It was a Saturday night. Damon and I had been out to dinner at the Oxo Tower to celebrate my birthday. The reason he booked a table was because I had almost been there for a birthday lunch five years ago, but my grandmother complained it would be pricey, to which my mother replied, sardonically, “I don’t know what she’s complaining about, she’s not going to pay for it anyway”. It was a story I liked to tell, complete with hand gestures, West Country accents, and melodrama. It was a missed opportunity that Damon had thoughtfully addressed. Afterwards, we took a walk by the Thames, then from the train station in Anerley we cut across the park to get home, the same way that we always walked. We were about a third of way across when we saw the gang.
There were two choices: to carry on, or to turn around. We walked on, wary of them, but it was only when they started to follow us that Damon turned and said, “Do you want to run?” We had not run far before I heard Damon shout. I looked back to see that they had caught up with him, and without thinking I turned around and headed back into the fray. It was at that precise moment that three words changed nature of the attack. I was thumped to the ground, and kicked; when I tried to get up the more aggressive of the three yelled, “Stay down, faggot”.
It was only afterwards that I started to think about that one word. It raced around my head as we sat in A&E, where we waited for over four hours. I heard it over and over as I replayed the event in my head. My heart raced faster. When the doctor looked at my x-rays, and we were given the all clear, we went home to sleep, but that did not last long. I woke up with my heart still racing, and the first words I remembered were, “stay down, faggot”.
Faggot is such a word brutal word, with a history tied inextricably to notions of masculinity. The Roman poet Cattulus, who lived from 84 to 54 BCE, repeatedly used the word cinaedus – faggot – whenever his masculinity was questioned. Even though Cattulus penned love poems to boys – some of whom were slaves and some of whom were, scandalously, freeborn – he was notoriously protective of his masculinity, which he associated exclusively with the active role. To be cinaedus was to be passive, a traitor to masculinity, and more like a woman than a man. The origin of the word faggot as a general insult for homosexual men is unclear. It is an urban legend that it dates from the 16th century, when “faggot” meant a bundle of small sticks. This “faggot” was used to start the bonfires that burned heretics and deviants, hence the legend.
I started to tell the story using that incendiary word. I had taken a photograph of myself minutes after the attack, covered in blood from the lesion on my head, the split of my lip, the cuts on my face. I posted the image to Facebook – both to my own page, and to the Polari Magazine fan page. I quoted the three words, “stay down, faggot”. The story spread like wildfire. It was picked up by the online gay press, as well as a number of influential Facebook groups, and with that the nature of the event changed again.
I received hundreds of messages, and I was invariably congratulated for being brave in telling the story of what happened. I did not feel like I was being brave at all. I was cocooning myself in the aftermath of the attack, weaving the attention around myself to form a barrier that protected me from the concrete impact of a brutal attack. I wanted it to mean something, so I channeled it through my role as the editor of an LGBT+ publication. The media wanted to talk about that one word, “faggot”. It may not have been the reason for the opportunistic attack, yet because the word was used the attack was then branded a homophobic one. From thereon it was the story’s pivot. In a week when rebel Conservative MPs were hitting out against the government’s equal marriage bill, the event became a story, and a way in which to understand how the posturing of reactionary politicians can vindicate homophobic language.
The meaning of words, and the social meaning we assign to words, is the glue that binds us together. Words make society possible, and they in turn invent us, define us. In the days following the attack, I kept thinking about what that process meant, and then I realised the words I was using to describe it were not mine. In the essay ‘On Liars’, first published in 1581, Michel de Montaigne observed that “it is only our words that bind us together and make us human”. He deplores how words are twisted for opposite ends by people “whose profession it is never to utter a word without trimming it to suit whatever business is being negotiated at the time”. The words that bind us are just as easily used to divide us, to create a fictional world of “us and them”. It is easier to take exception to “aggressive homosexuals”, to use Tory MP Gerald Howarth’s asinine phrase, than it is to dismiss people who are treated as second class citizens, unequal under the rule of law. In that instance, words are torn from the sphere of social justice and warped to yield political rhetoric.
Such political rhetoric is more often that not, as George Orwell observed in 1946, largely “a defence of the indefensible”. It reels around the rebranding of ideas rather than the human experience. When the politician talks in stock phrases, “the appropriate noises are coming out of his layrnx, but his brain is not involved as it would be as if he were choosing his own words.” I talked to Peter Levy on BBC radio a couple days after the attack, and we were joined by the Tory MP Martin Vickers. Mr Vickers said that he was against the equal marriage bill because he needed to respect the opinions of his elder constituents, who were uncomfortable with the issue. The word ‘respect’ was used to defend the indefensible. The soft word ‘respect’ hid the real meaning of the statement, that we should respect prejudice, and favour that prejudice over social change. The word was simply twisted to suit the business at hand.
Physical violence is a great leveller. No matter the reason, it is a violation of the everyday world, a transgression that could happen to anyone. I walked past the site of the attack a few days after in an attempt to understand that idea. It was 6 o’clock on the Monday evening, and so still light. There were children in the playground, and the noise of their play hummed, making the unsafe feel safe. I was on my way to a press event for Pride, an event that has become far more about the corporate sponsors than the community, and even though the team running it has changed, that sad fact has not. I was badly bruised, my lips at least triple their usual size, and my face punctuated with cuts held together not by stitches but skin glue. I felt self-conscious, aware of the stolen glances at my injuries, and the marketing buzz words circulated the meeting washed over me.
I did not realise how unnerved I still was until I walked home from the station. Even though there was a constant stream of traffic rushing past I was tense. When I got to the end of my street there was a man in a hoodie loitering at the bus stop. As I turned off the main road, away from the traffic, I worried that he would start to run after me. I was shaking when I got into the house. That feeling was the real meaning of the attack and out of the reach of all the words I had used to make sense of it.
In the first few days after the attack, in my zeal to make the event mean something, I was angry, selfish, and I inadvertently shut Damon out. Talking to the media, dealing with the ramifications of the event online, I had a way to deal with it. I seized it without thinking. The injuries Damon sustained were not to his face, and so the impact in the virtual world was not as immediate. It was the picture of my bloodied face that circulated, but as my injuries started to heal his pain only got worse. Within a few days he was back in A&E where he was told he had a trapped nerve: sciatica. I knew then that I had to slow down, to stop turning away from what had happened, and to turn back to our everyday world.
The truth of the situation is that we were lucky, that it could have been far worse. In the end, there is no word that is equal to the attack, nor words that can make sense of the damage that was done. Words may make our social world possible, and it may be that without words we are animals. Yet in the face of this experience I do not have the words.
