CJ Pascoe and Dalton Conley discuss her book, Dude You're a Fag

CJ, in your recent book, Dude You're A Fag, you talk about the label 'fag'

as less something that's about sexual orientation in the youth you studied

and more about policing the boundaries of masculinity -- gender role as opposed to sexuality.

Could you elaborate and tell us about that?

What I found out when I was doing the research for Dude You're a Fag

I spent about a year and a half hanging out with kids in a high school

I was struck by how often boys would call one another 'fag' or 'faggot'

and it happened so often that it would echo in my head even when I was not at the research site.

And so I started investigating, what did they mean when they called one another a 'fag'?

Because I think -- as most people would sort of suspect or have a hunch --

I thought that they actually thought that they were calling one another homosexual, right?

That they might as well be saying, "You're so gay" or "You're actually a homosexual."

And when I started questioning them about it,

boys would say things to me like,

"It has nothing to do with sexual preference at all.

You could just be calling someone an idiot, you know?"

And so I kind of began to ask them,

what sort of things could you do that would get you called a fag?

And quickly a list came to the surface.

If you danced, if you cared about your clothing,

if you were too emotional, or if you were incompetent.

And so all of these things they defined as unmasculine.

And so what I came to realize was that they used 'fag'

as an insult to police the boundaries of masculinity.

That it wasn't really about same-sex desire.

And in fact when I asked them about same-sex desire, one boy said,

"Well, being gay is just a lifestyle.

You can still throw a football around and be gay."

And so that's when I realized that, being gay, while it wasn't exactly accepted,

it wasn't that bad.

It was much worse to be an unmasculine man than it was to be a masculine man who desired another man.

And so that's what they were really doing with this 'fag' insult

or what I came to call the 'fag discourse'

was that they were policing the boundaries of masculinity

and continually interactionally reminding one another how to be masculine.

So in this racially-integrated, working-class high school

where you did your field work,

did you really encounter boys, teenage boys, that were openly homosexual yet very masculine

and therefore were accepted by their heterosexual peers?

So, at River High, there were three out gay boys,

and they were accepted to different extents by their straight peers.

There was one boy, an African-American boy, who was normatively masculine.

He wasn't on the football team, but, as my boys would say,

you couldn't tell he was gay, right, just by looking at him.

And so he passed, in a sense.

He also surrounded himself with girls,

and they set up sort of a protective border around him.

And he didn't interact with most of the students at the school.

There was another boy who also was normatively masculine.

He was very tall, he was large, he was a big kid.

He could've passed for much older than sixteen, which is what he was.

And boys never talked about him when I said,

"Who are the gay boys at your school?

Who would you point out as a 'fag' at your school?"

This boy's name was never brought up.

And indeed when I interviewed him,

he never reported being harrassed.

And my hunch is because he was normatively masculine and relatively large,

that boys didn't target him.

The boy who was targeted, Ricky,

broke both rules of gender and sexuality.

So not only did he have same-sex desire,

he was very open about having same-sex desire.

He also broke gender rules in that he cross-dressed,

he danced like girls danced, he had long hair.

And so for that reason, boys targeted him relentlessly.

And they targeted him so relentlessly that he dropped out of school eventually.

What implications does your research have for public policy

for, for example, hate crimes legislation?

One conclusion one might draw is just that this is harmless boundary work

that might have been done using racial epithets in the past.

As you mention, it's in a way a sign of the success of the gay rights movement.

So maybe legislatures and liberal activists should just chill out

and not worry about it so much?

Is that the conclusion,

or do you have a more activist policy conclusion out of all this?

So I think out of this research comes a couple policy conclusions.

When we look at some events in recent history,

over the past two to three years,

we see a couple things.

We see instances such as the death of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover,

who was an 11-year-old in Massachussetts who was teased and bullied

for being very into academics and was subject to what I would call the fag discourse.

And he ended up killing himself because of it.

We know of cases of boys who engage in cross-gender behavior

who make public their same-sex desire

and they're either teased for it or sometimes killed for it.

We also know that 90% of school shooters who go on rampage school shootings

have been subject to homophobic harrassment and teasing.

So we know that there are consequences to the fag discourse.

Most boys don't go to those extremes, but some boys do.

And even boys who don't, such as Ricky, who was subject to all sorts of harassment in my book,

ended up dropping out of school,

because he simply couldn't get the protection he needs.

So I think that all of that leads us to conclude that we do need to have some policy recommendations

because there are very serious consequences.

California has taken a stop in the right direction.

They passed the California Safe Schools and Violence Prevention Act

in which students are prohibited from teasing one another

based on sexual or gender presentation.

Very few states have such a law.

Massachussetts actually has such a law.

And so I think that that sort of bullying and harassment legislation

is one of the first steps that needs to be taken.

I think the other thing that we need to see is in teacher training.

Most teachers don't recognize this sort of behavior as harassment.

They see it as 'boys will be boys' type behavior.

They see what goes on between boys and girls as flirting.

And so we need to make teachers aware of this sort of behavior

and give them tools with which to deal with this behavior.