Why the F-Slur Won’t Stay Dead

Friday, December 5, 2025.

A word we tried to bury refuses to stay where we put it.

Every society has a word it weaponizes and later pretends to regret.

The f-slur is ours.

It has lived many lives—bludgeon, joke, code, seduction, provocation, elegy. We declared it dead several times. No one believed us.

The word has returned, not sheepishly but triumphantly.

It appears on theater marquees, in gallery titles, across queer gaming circles, inside performance art manifestos. It is a ghost with tenure.

And like all ghosts, it only appears when the living have unresolved business.

The f-slur survives because the culture that produced it never dismantled the conditions that made it necessary. A slur is not a word. It is a system reporting on itself.

And this system is very much still here.

Language Is Never Just Language

Slurs don’t vanish when we stop saying them.

They vanish when the underlying power structure collapses—and America hasn’t collapsed.

It hasn’t even flinched. The machinery that made the word possible—misogyny, policing of masculinity, racial hierarchies, Christian nationalism, homophobia masquerading as “values”—is still functioning beautifully.

So the word resurfaces, because all the forces that made it poisonous remain intact.

We pretend we’re debating vocabulary. We are actually debating power distribution.

The Word as Trauma, Torch, and Tool

For older queer folks, the word is a scar—visible or not, but always tender.

It was shouted from passing cars, carved into school bathroom stalls, stitched invisibly into the casual cruelties of daily life.

For younger queer folks, the word feels like a stolen object they’ve decided to repossess.

They pick it up, spin it around, and wonder why anyone ever let the straights have it in the first place. To them, the danger is part of the pleasure.

But neither relationship is whimsical.

Reclaiming a slur is not an aesthetic choice. It’s an act of survival.

A way to metabolize humiliation into agency. A way to turn linguistic debris into architecture.

If you can carry the word that once tried to kill you, then maybe it loses the ability to finish the job. We need new words, and sometimes repurposing words is the best method.

Race Complicates Everything—Because Race Is the Thing Everything Rests On

The queer relationship to the f-slur is never race-neutral. It cannot be.

Black and brown queer people were never just targeted for their sexuality.

They were targeted for gender, for class, for not performing the narrow version of masculinity demanded by whiteness. Being called the word did not erase their Blackness or their Latinidad; it compounded the punishment for both.

In queer spaces, whiteness often dictates the terms of “acceptable rebellion.”

But reclamation does not feel the same when the slur is layered atop centuries of racialized violence.

You cannot experience a word cleanly when the world refuses to see you cleanly.

So for many queer artists of color, using the f-slur becomes a double act of defiance:
Against the straight world that used it to police them, and against the queer world that tried to separate their queerness from their race.

Their reclamation isn’t decorative. It’s more like a insurgence.

Class Writes Its Own Dictionary

The f-slur was never distributed evenly.

Children in wealthy suburbs heard it whispered or written in chalk.

Children in working-class neighborhoods heard it shouted by boys who had been handed violence by their fathers and needed somewhere to put it down.

A slur is often a class inheritance: the anger usually rolls downhill.

When queer artists reclaim the word, they are also reclaiming the classed experience of being told they were “too much” of one thing, “not enough” of another, and economically disposable either way.

This is why I think that the word returns so fully in art:
Art is where class rage can be re-coded into something survivable.

Reclamation Is Not a Group Project

It does not involve voting.
It does not require universal comfort.
It does not seek approval from panels, communities, or algorithms.

The people harmed by the word get to decide its future.
The people who weren’t harmed by it do not.

This is not hypocrisy. It is boundary.

In other words, if you were not cut by the blade, you do not get to swing the blade, bless your heart.

Why Artists Reach for the Word Now

Because polite language cannot describe a world slipping toward reactionary violence.
Because queer life is increasingly legislated against, surveilled, commodified, and sanitized.
Because euphemisms do not protect anyone.
Because slurs do not stay buried when the conditions that birthed them have returned to the surface.

Artists reach for the f-slur for the same reason miners carry canaries: to test the air.

If a slur feels newly usable, it is because the world feels newly dangerous.

Queer artists are using the word as a warning flare, a battle cry, an obituary, a love letter, a joke, a curse, a prayer. It contains more than one meaning because queer life contains more than one truth.

A reclaimed slur is a record of what the culture has done and what queer souls have survived.

The Real Reason It Won’t Stay Dead

Because queer folks are not dead.
Because pressure produces rebellion.
Because language bends toward the people who need it, not the people who fear it.
Because history keeps tightening its fist, and queer artists keep refusing to be crushed.

The f-slur won’t stay dead because the world that created it won’t stay gentle.

And queer people—especially those at the itchy intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality—have never had the luxury of gentle language.

Dead words stay dead only when the living no longer have use for them.

This one, apparently, still has some work to do.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

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