Oct 28, 20203 min
by Matthew Magill
"I used the word liberally in order to scare away straight people"
From effete to queer, Mikey goes on a journey through history to reimagine slurs that every member of the LGBTQ+ community has sadly heard at least once in their time. In regard to this, he explains that the title of the work refers to “anyone who feels a connection to the words explored within. This connection may be one of pride, shame, rage, reclamation, rejection…”. After helping Mikey with the edits to his work, we celebrated with a few questions on what brought him to this radical project.
I was first inspired to write the poem effete upon learning that it means ‘worn out from childbirth’.
As both a queer man and a trans man it struck me as an eye-opening example of how we ascribe attributes such as femininity, weakness, and infertility to the class I’ve referred to as ‘faggots’ throughout the zine – those considered deviant from sexual and gendered norms. From there I kept thinking of more words with similar connotations and wondering where they came from and how they came to refer to faggots.
I joke in the introduction to the zine that I used the word ‘faggot’ liberally within it in order to “scare away straight people”. I actually hope that cisgender, heterosexual readers can get a lot out of this zine, but they’ll have to be open to the deliberate discomforting of sexual and gendered power structures which is inherent to the reclamation of these words.
It was fun to be able to combine my nerdy fascination with word history together with page poetry to create something new.
I also have some plans in the works for other linguistics-themed poetry zines.
My favourite thing I’ve learned was definitely reading the autobiographies of George Henry, Jan Gay and Alfred Gross when researching the poem gay.
They were all such fascinating people living through a pivotal moment in the representation of LGBTQ+ people in medical and sociological research. Going forwards, I’m very interested to research the ways in which queer men and other LGBTQ+ people use ‘she’ to refer to people (usually those who don’t primarily identify with that pronoun) and even to inanimate objects. Watching the Boys in The Band remake made me realise just how long that phenomenon has been around for.
Name your price for a copy of Mikey’s work here
Matthew Magill is the poetry editor of the Radical Art Review