Avoiding the other F-word
The
editorial in the 6/29/06 Bay
Area Reporter (a San Francisco weekly "serving the gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender communities since 1971"), "Ozzie and the 'fags'" begins:
If we see the phrases "a derogatory
term used to describe someone's sexual orientation" or "a slur
associated with homosexuality" in place of the direct quote "fag" one
more time, we're going to scream. Those are the phrases most mainstream
media outlets have used repeatedly for the last several days when
reporting on the latest verbal tirade of Chicago White Sox manager
Ozzie Guillen [on 6/20/06]. Guillen disagreed with comments made in a
column by Chicago Sun-Times writer Jay Mariotti and called him a "fag."
Plain and simple.
Actually, Guillen managed a double-F, or fortissimo, performance -- he
called Mariotti a "fucking fag" -- with an S intro, "What a piece of
shit he is, fucking fag".
(Well, that's how the F part of his performance was reported by Sal
Marinello on the Blogscritics
site, one of the very few to venture to print any version of fuck at all in the coverage of the
Guillen affair. I'd guess that Guillen said "fuckin' fag", but
that could be hard to check.)
It's a sign of my profound lack of interest in the sports world and my
keen attention to the gay world that this news came to me more than a
week after the event, in the BAR.
By then, googling on <"Ozzie Guillen" "Jay Mariotti"> was pulling
up over 73,000 webhits, most of them about this incident. And by
then, Guillen had "apologized", after a fashion -- according to an Associated
Press story,
"I shouldn't have mentioned the name
that was mentioned, but I'm not going to back off of Jay," Guillen
said, using another profanity to describe Mariotti.
and had been disciplined by baseball commissioner Bud Selig, with a
fine and an order to attend sensitivity training. For several
days, Guillen continued to explain that he had nothing against
homosexuals, and he even plans to go to the Gay Games in Chicago, and
he doesn't speak English well and in his native Venezuela that word
isn't a slur (
fag is a word of
Venezuelan Spanish? who knew? or is he saying that
maricón isn't a slur in
Venezuela? that, too, would be news to me), and anyway "I wasn't
calling people that. I was calling him that." The
BAR's editorial cartoon, by Paul
Berge, nicely skewers Guillen's self-defense:
I've been asked to apologize for
calling a newspaper columnist a blankety-blank three-letter F-word.
If I hurt anybody with what I called him, I apologize. But I
wasn't talking about those people. I was talking strictly about that columnist.
I have nothing against those
people! I was just saying that I don't like the guy, so he must
be one of them!
[in thought balloon] ...And the league thinks I need sensitivity training! Hah!
Various sports columnists --
Gene
Wojciechowski and
Mark
Kreidler on ESPN.com, for instance -- deplored Guillen's
language, but (unlike the major news bureaus) used the word
fag, as did Mariotti in
his
own
Chicago Sun-Times columns, though Mariotti kept his distance from
fuck; from his 6/25 column:
I keep wondering how many other
managers and coaches would have been fired for describing someone as "a
[bleeping] fag.''
The
BAR editorial continues:
So we have two issues: Guillen's
homophobic comment, and the decision by most newspapers to clean up the
quote. The problem with the former likely won't be solved by
sensitivity training -- Guillen remains a hothead, in our opinion, and
seems resistant to change, according to comments made by family members
in news accounts about his latest tirade. That's too bad, because as
our readers know, homophobia in professional sports remains a major
league problem, and rather than fight learning about new things,
Guillen should embrace change.
But the other issue also is important. Media outlets should print "fag"
if that's what someone says. For many years, the word has been viewed
widely as an antigay slur, and people should be held accountable for
their comments. If they want to continue to be homophobic, that's their
right, but let us see it in print and hear it on the air. Letter-writer
John Sulikowski called Editor and
Publisher, a trade publication, to task for cleaning up
Guillen's comments: "Typical gutless journalism," he wrote.
The paper is (covertly) making a distinction here between two classes
of "bad words": taboo words, like
fuck,
which are offensive in polite society regardless of the intentions of
people who use them (the offense comes with the word); and slurs, like
fag, which are offensive because
they can be used as insults (the offense comes with the way the word is
used). Slurs can have non-offensive uses, in in-group talk, by
reclamation, as signs of trust and intimacy, and so on. I myself
am on record (in the 6/03 issue of
Out)
as having no problem being called or calling myself a
fag or
faggot, in certain contexts.
And non-slurs can be used as insults; if Guillen had called Mariotti a
gay or a homosexual, rather than a fag, he wouldn't have won any
politeness prizes, since in this context the attribution of
homosexuality, however neutrally expressed, expresses contempt, and so
counts as an insult. Guillen, being a foul-mouthed asshole
("asshole" is Marinello's characterization of him), just ratcheted
things up one notch.
But the
BAR takes things one
step further: people who use slurs as insults, it maintains (and I'm
inclined to agree), should have the ugliness of their attitudes
exposed, not politely and protectively covered up. I am not less
offended when the AP reports that Guillen uttered "a derogatory term
that is often used to describe someone's sexual orientation" (that's 12
words, 25 syllables, folks) than I am by Mariotti's report that Guillen
said "fag". (In fact, the direct version is much more informative
than the
fag-avoiding
version. After all, Guillen had so many other choices of
derogatory terms to use:
faggot,
cocksucker,
fairy,
queer,
homo,
pansy, and
fruit, at least.) The
BAR's position here is a lot like
the position taken by the
Guardian,
the
Economist, and the
New Yorker (among other
publications) on the serious taboo words, that they should be used only
in quotations, and then only for good reason, and in those
circumstances should be printed as-is and not avoided. As for
Guillen, we should let him condemn himself out of his own mouth.
[Note: following almost all of my sources, including the White Sox
site, I give the man's name as Guillen rather than Guillén.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 4, 2006 03:26 PM