Why Is That Word on the Marquee?
by Robert Nesti
Sitting above the Port Deli on New York’s 8th Avenue is a poster for the play currently selling out in the theater in the building – the Studio Seaview operated by Playwrights Horizons. That company’s latest hit is Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot, a satiric fantasia that posits what happens when queer, college aged Prince George brings Dev, his Indian boyfriend, home to meet William and Kate.
For those who see the branding, either on the 8th Avenue sign or on a Prince Faggot totebag that’s being merchandized, seeing the slur will come as a surprise, shock even. Like, ‘Really?’ And it could trigger a visceral response from those who have heard the word hurled at them, either verbally or as part of a physical assault, especially viewed in such a public way without warning. (An added irony is just across the street is a Chick-fil-A restaurant, a chain that has its own issues with the queer community.)
But this Hell’s Kitchen location isn’t the only place in New York City this year where the word is seen in signage, programs, or in merchandising. Kevin Carillo’s Figaro/Faggots fused Mozart with Larry Kramer’s disco-era novel played at Baryshnikov Arts. The Park Avenue Armory just opened Ted Huffman and Philip Venables’s operatic The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, adapted from Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s 1977 queer liberation manifesto. This past summer this was a production of Topher Payne’s Angry Fags at Manhattan’s Theater Lab and last month in Chicago at the Ghostlight Ensemble Theatre Company. (It was first seen at that city’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2015.) Victor Rodger’s Black Faggot recently turned up in Australia and New Zealand, and is being presented as a solo piece in Berlin.
And this past summer 28-year old, New York artist Quil Lemons, 28, curated a group show and an event series in Provincetown, Massachusetts, under the name American Faggot Party. On his Instragram post, he wrote: “AFP will stand as a testament to the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—illuminating the works of contemporary queer artists who, in the spirit of revolution, celebrate the vibrancy of queer existence in a post-AIDS landscape. Through art, we challenge conventions, dismantle boundaries, and ignite dialogue on identity, representation, and equality.”
He continued: “Join us. This is not just a show. It’s a party. It’s a protest. It’s a movement.”
Still, the word has such a verboten nature that 60-year old actor K. Todd Freeman, who is currently appearing in Prince Faggot, needed to tell his agents it was okay to use it. For his part, he has no problem with it. “I understand that it’s a word that generates a strong reaction from many people,” he told the Washington Post recently. “I prefer doing things that push the limits, push the boundaries and are outside of the box. So I thought it was cool.”
Cool or not, the term has turned up so often this year that Erik Piepenburg wondered in the New York Times if it was more than just a coincidence. So, why is it happening at this moment? First, though, a little history.
Faggot Through History
Before “faggot” became a slur, it was firewood. The word traces back to 14th-century Middle English fagot, likely borrowed from the Old French fagot, meaning a bundle of sticks tied together for burning. For centuries, it meant exactly that: kindling, fuel, something you threw on a fire and forgot about. Jonathan Dent, a senior editor working on the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, traces the term to this mundane, functional origin—wood bound for the flames.
What’s apocryphal is the dark mythology that connects “faggot” with the burning of queer people during Medieval times. There’s no credible historical evidence that gay men were called “faggots” because they were used as kindling for fires, though the image has persisted in queer cultural memory as a kind a Medieval Urban Legend that feels true even if it isn’t. What is documented is that by the late 16th century, “faggot” had taken on a derogatory sense in British slang: a term for a contemptible or unpleasant woman, often old or nagging.
How the word became attached to homosexual men came in the early 20th century in North America. The first recorded use of “faggot” as a slur for effeminate or homosexual men appears in the 1914 publication A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang, which spelled it with one “g” and used it in the example: “All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight.” The shortened form “fag” first appeared in 1923 in Nels Anderson’s The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man: “Fairies or Fags are men or boys who exploit sex for profit.”
By the 1920s and 1930s, the term (as well as shortened to “fag”) was commonplace. In 1920s New York, according to historian George Chauncey, “faggot” described an effeminate homosexual who sought social and sexual relations with “normal men,” while a “flaming faggot” was an extremely obvious, flamboyant gay man. The word appeared in Claude McKay’s 1928 Harlem Renaissance novel Home to Harlem, where one character mentions “a bulldyking woman and a faggoty man.”
In the post-WWII era, especially the 1950s when queers were subjected to increased surveillance, criminalization, and violence, the use of word became more sinister. It frequently was the word spat before a beating, the insult hurled from a car window, the slur muttered in a police station. And unlike some slurs that have faded from common use, “faggot” has retained its cutting edge, particularly for men who came of age when it was still the sound of a threat.
From The Faggot to Faggots to Prince Faggot
The start of the term being redefined in the queer community can be traced to its use as a title to an off-Broadway revue, The Faggot, by Al Carmines, an ordained minister and one of the leading voices in the off-off Broadway movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Coming just four years after Stonewall, it marked a cultural shift by those in the community attempting to take back and defang the word. Carmines’ show first premiered at the Judson Poets’ Theater before moving to off-Broadway’s Truck and Warehouse Theatre for a 203-performance run. In reviewing the show for the New York Times, Clive Barnes (clumsily) praised its forthrightness, adding the show – a contemporary overview of queer life — had “taste a good natured sense of the ridiculous and an open-hearted realization of the differing natures of sexuality. Vive la difference—and here even la difference is difference.” Some weeks later a Sunday piece in the same paper by queer activist Martin Duberman damned the revue for perpetuating stereotypes. “The Faggot’s cheap parodies will help to perpetuate stereotypes that a serious movement has been attempting to eradicate—at the cost of jobs and apartments, jail sentences and beatings, broken noses and rape,” he wrote. And in his conclusion added: “With friends like The Faggot, the gay movement needs no enemies.” The off-Broadway run concluded shortly after that and the show hasn’t performed since.
About the same time in Boston, the publication Fag Rag – a decidedly queer, counter-culture journal – proudly displayed the word in large, bold type on its masthead. Published by the Fag Rag Collective, it was a radically queer, anti‑assimilationist, anti-capitalism journal that argued for erotic freedom and against traditional politics. Though it only published a few thousand copies a month, it quickly became a leading voice in post-Stonewall queer politics until it ceased publication in the mid-1980s.
But the crucial event in the evolution of the word came when screenwriter/playwright/activist Larry Kramer used it for the title of his 1978 novel Faggots. The book, a sharp, satirical look at 1970s queer life in NYC prior to the emergence of HIV, followed a Kramer-stand-in (named Fred Lemish) searching for love in all the wrong places: bathhouses, West Side bars, and Fire Island. Kramer never addressed why he named the book with this word, but in the novel Lemish sets on a mission: to “de-kike the word ‘faggot,’ which had punch, bite, a no-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-deprecatory than, say, ‘American.’” It was Kramer’s way of neutralizing the word of its inflammatory nature. While many criticized Kramer for his hectoring tone, his use of the word in his title was an attempt to take the word back and give it a new meaning, just as it is today with these differently titled productions.
The artists behind the current wave of productions are following Kramer’s lead, insisting they’re engaged in reclamation, not exploitation. Jordan Tannahill told the Times he never considered calling his play anything else: “Prince Faggot is punchy, and as a title it helps to lodge in people’s brains.” During the show’s London run, Ted Huffman, the director of Faggots and Their Friends, explained to the Southbank Centre that using a title already embedded in the source material felt like “a call of duty,” adding, “What better way to steal it from those who would use it as a weapon against us?”
Jeremy O. Harris, the actor and playwright who is producing Prince Faggot, points out that “Prince Gay would mean nothing.” He’s not wrong— Prince Faggot gets a reaction. Prince Gay sounds like a Hallmark Movie.
Topher Payne, who wrote Angry Fags (as well as Hallmark Movies) recently told the Washington Post that using the word clues the audience in on the play’s edgy nature. Its trangression is conveyed in its title. “With something like Angry Fags, it’s not intended to be needlessly provocative, but I think sometimes we need that additional jolt. If you have a problem with the title, you’re really going to have a problem with the play.” And he considers the word a mark of distinction. “I’m a fag like Oscar Wilde, like James Baldwin, like Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams. Fags don’t just exist within the culture; they’re responsible for commentary and refinement.”
Huffman reports that European audiences found that hearing “faggot” spoken “hundreds of times” in his show—”with love and joy and silliness”—robbed the word of its shock value and gave it “a new power.” Kevin Carillo, the director and choreographer of Figaro/Faggots—the Baryshnikov Arts production that fused Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro with Kramer’s novel—was called a ‘faggot’ recently by a passerby while walking to rehearsal. Instead of taking offense, he was empowered. “I thought I was looking great, I had on a new outfit,” he recalled. “It strengthened the punch I was putting into the work.” Nonetheless when asked by the Washington Post to define the word, Carillo mentioned its troubled legacy. “It’s a word that encapsulates experiences that are painful. It’s a word that can feel like a badge of honor. And the reality is that it’s still used as a word of oppression.”
Good, Bad, or Ugly?
A publicity photo for The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.
The use of the word comes down to a simple binary: one man’s empowerment is another man’s trigger. Language scholar Gregory Coles points out that a title like Prince Faggot, emblazoned on the side of a building visible to anyone passing by, creates a disorienting experience: “We don’t know who the speaker is, and the presumed audience seems to be everybody. It’s disorienting because our brains are coded to be looking for context, and the word triggers this ambivalence in our interpretive minds.”
Inside a theater, context is built in: program notes, artistic statements, the framing of queer authorship. Outside, on a poster or a tote bag, that context collapses.
Queer sociologist Meredith G.F. Worthen is direct about the stakes: “I get nervous to give our words to the straight community. The harm value of hearing the word has not been taken away.” But such was the case with queer, which is now so mainstream that it can be found in style guides for leading publications. For years, it was frowned upon, then debated, then accepted as a suitable alternative to gay. But it still has detractors.
Much of this has to do with generational differences. Younger queer people, who came of age in an era of increased LGBTQ+ visibility, often see the use of the word faggot as bold and necessary..They are less likely to carry visceral memories of the word as a prelude to harm.
For older gay men—those who lived through the AIDS crisis, who were beaten in alleys, who heard “faggot” as a daily threat—the word carries different weight. Adam Greenfield, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, acknowledges that the title of Prince Faggot can trigger an audience member even before entering the theater: “Whether it’s distaste or anxiety or intrigue, the title positions you in the play before you know anything about it.”
The surge of “faggot” in theater titles in 2025 represents a high-stakes experiment: Can a word be drained of its poison through artistic intention and repetition? These artists reclaiming the word believe it can. And they are drawing a line in the sand. As Tannahill told the Times: “The word ‘faggot,’ if you’re up for it, let’s go. If not, Wicked is down the street.”
Are they on the right track? In other words, is faggot the new queer? Or is the use of it like putting lipstick on a pig?