Books: What does it mean to be gay?
The first chapter of the book Nobody Teaches You How to Be a Faggot, by Lucas Fauno. An excerpt from an essential biography.
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In this, his first book, Lucas Fauno asks what it means to be a faggot. What happens when "faggot" transcends those initial interpretations that only address sexual orientation? What is sociopolitical about identifying as such?
We share a chapter from his book published by Editorial Astronauta Ruso. In it, with a prolific delivery that translates into the text, he shares perspectives and anecdotes that lead him to conclusions without any preconceived notions.
Nobody teaches you how to be a faggot.
To the fucking kid and teenager I never got to be.
To all the rare existences that could not bloom.
To all the amazing and gay lives that deserve to shine.
1- Surviving the terror of others
If an alien were to descend from a spaceship right now and ask us what a faggot is, perhaps the first thing we'd do is make a gesture of putting an imaginary penis in our mouths or asses. Everything revolves around the flesh that hangs between our legs. It's assumed that what you do or don't do with that veiny piece defines your role in society. As if the use of a penis—your own or someone else's—were the only identity marker capable of defining us. However, it's time to break some skulls and come up with better answers.
Male faggots, queers with erect vulvas, lesbians with flaccid penises enjoying ass-slashing, cock-loving faggots, virile short-dicks, useless big-dicked men: all gathered under the defiant umbrella of the same word. Each way of being one is a note of this hyper-pop song that is danced on the face of churches, powers, Christmas tables, and old social writings.
Being a faggot is contaminating the rigid ecosystem of manhood . As a faggot, I'm not synonymous with "man." I'm not, and never was, what people think of when they say "man." I'm a traitor, someone who rejected the privilege of heterosexual masculinity tinged with harshness, indifference, and defiant comparisons. The day family love pruned away my queer talents one by one, leaving a barren field with a man's face, I swore revenge. All the shitty fertilizer and prejudice they planted in me now serve as thorns. They convinced me I was fragile and weak because they know that the faggot they don't kill will change the world.
My privilege is not being a man. If I walk past a group of straight men, I risk being insulted or even attacked. They know I'm "the other," the threat. Why would I want to be like "them"? To blend in so that "them" can't kill me? That's not choice or nature; it's extortion and a threat. I refuse to be born knowing what my life will be like. I prefer to be the danger that disrupts their monotony. A "twisted" life is one that allows other colors and narratives to enter. In contexts where the verbs "to be," "to seem," "to kiss," "to love," and "to exist" are a death sentence, that same deviant force is what helps twist the meanings of these words until they become a source of pride.
Someone once told me I was a lighthouse. I replied that no, I'm catching fire, burning and dying in a desperate struggle, shining brightly so that whoever reads this message knows that there are many of us and we need each other. Every queer person shines in their own way, with their own story and their own wounds; we exist "in spite of" everything.
They tried to force us to live with a merely decorative, utilitarian function for a moment of fun, a farcical narrative, lest our implosion reach them and force them to rethink themselves. But they didn't know that those places they humiliate are our most fertile ground. They must criticize our glory because they're afraid to admit how much they admire our freedom. A crazy woman dancing, sweating talent in the middle of a dance floor/stage/office/family is a disco ball that will reflect whatever you are. Do you dare look at yourself in those tiny squares? I'm sure you're dying to kill me, because I live the queer fury that burns within you, but also because I'm too real to put up with. There's no justice in the fact that for your mediocrity to disappear, my life has to disappear too. There's no social justice if our bodies and biographies have to pay the debt each of us owes to our own disappointment. Sometimes being queer is surviving the terror of others. We are not going to atone for the guilt and cowardice of a society that thinks that, once the mirror is dead, the reflection is healed.
Who's going to kill me today? Mom taking away my pink toys that aren't mine? My teacher telling me it's "not manly" to play with the girls? Gym class punishing my queerness on the soccer field? How many deaths can the fragile body of a little queer boy, just starting out in life, endure? Why? What's the accusation? How can a wonderful little queer boy in colorful sneakers on a soccer field represent a Molotov cocktail to social fragility? How much can a growing queer boy withstand?
Being gay is like being an alchemist who hatches diamonds from a coal-black ass. Some demonstrate it in visual arts, others in fashion. Many will be part of creating plans that will mutate into companies functioning like clockwork. Because we nurture structures that please the system; everything that exists was surely invented by a faggot and copied in a mediocre way by some bureaucrat of normality. Applause for the faggots who make their own bodies a hypnotic element, whether for dance or sex work. A hug and a space of healing for the others who must hide their effeminate side to improve societies. Be that as it may, in any discipline, with what is given, a faggot transmutes everything. But humanity cages what it admires. The extravagance of the faggot in a dictatorial street, or the prudishness of heterodemocracy that does not protect "the weirdos," will always be grounds for punishment and confinement. Now, if that eccentricity is meant to be applauded by markets or to satisfy the morbid curiosity of some power, then it will be rewarded. If my queer flesh is the main course of some fascist, I will be the most delicious loin bathed in a sauce of milk curdled by so much hatred, and I will only be allowed to live if I demand nothing in return, neither money nor freedom.
Why should the fate of a gay man lie in the hands of "normal" people and moral arbiters? Being gay means that they constantly try to take away your autonomy , your recognition as something you own, the talents and pleasures that spring from you, all of which are ripped out as a price to pay for life.
Being gay means developing big, wide eyes, constant awareness, a gaze that pierces walls and miles, to see when existence becomes dangerous and to find the spaces where you can shine. We must never forget that, even though sometimes we fly freer and with more oxygen, that doesn't mean the cage isn't there .
To be a faggot is to have your happiness and identity cut off, forcing you to conform to functional subjects. Sometimes, even to resemble those domesticated faggots, subservient to the oppressor. But who are all these "others"? We were born faggots in a democratic apocalypse and forced to kill and survive. Sometimes, even to murder our desire to be and do, leaving only a body that still appears to be alive. That "others," that threat, is usually just the tip of the iceberg. Hatred is never an isolated event; it's the guillotine-shaped domino that ends a chain of violence, hierarchies, lukewarm allies, lies, and injustices.
Let's go back to the beginning. Is being gay simply about where we insert and receive penises? No. It's much more than that. A gay man is a rebellion, and the "they" who eliminate us are neither straight nor gay, neither man nor woman; they are all of these at once, because at the end of the day, their bodies, their faces, their ideas are nothing more than an implanted, strategic, and stale discourse that aims to sever any trace of freedom . They don't kill gay men; they kill freedoms in queer bodies. The executioner should be grateful that so many of us are born, because the day they run out of effeminate men to eliminate, they'll go after the executioners, who will no longer be of any use to them.
It will never be easy being a faggot. It's a lifelong task, a lifelong endeavor. It's tempting to assimilate into "them" and feign normality, but I doubt that's living. Those who are shedding their rotten shells and timidly dipping their toe into the cool waters of "being queer" and experiencing this driving force know this. Being queer is an ethic, a life impulse, a response to the monotony of monotonous fascism.
So now it's your faggot eyes that, like a sexual organ, become erect to rapidly read the paragraphs that define you. Your fingers dilate to reach and suck on each page, each idea, and all this happens in an organism that is beginning to understand the autonomy of each independent region that together we sometimes call the body. How can I deny you the fact that you're a faggot? I don't need to know where your genitals are located or what feeling fuels your loving terrors. I'm just another nobody in your life, only I prefer not to tell you who or what you are. I prefer to sit close until you can tell me what word you're being shamefully exposed for.
Being gay is a difficult task for anyone who manages to open their chest and reveal it to the world. Do you understand the responsibility of being gay in a community? Honesty, respect, collective building, the rage for justice, friendship as family, celebration as commitment, contradiction as a guide. Where do these words reside for you?
Therefore, it's impossible to define what it means to be a faggot, because its very existence erases the boundaries of convention . It's about unlocking new maps as you go, answering everything with more questions, forging alliances not only against hatred, but in pursuit of a love born from scars and struggles.
A queer person escapes the binary system that offers only two options to create a thousand more, inviting its judges to be so happy that they no longer need to kill. And penises? Welcome, they must be celebrated as they deserve, like so many other body parts for being eroticized. No one is going to cut them off or turn them into obelisks of worship. Because being gay is so much more; it's resisting in a world that doesn't seem to want questions to be born anymore. That a gay person is born, emerges, and lives is the best thing that can happen to this reality.
Lucas 'Fauno' Gutiérrez is a journalist, human rights activist, and writer. His work has been published in Página/12 , The Washington Post , and BuzzFeed , and he currently works as an audience editor at Agencia Presentes . He has given two TEDx talks and in 2024 received Amnesty International's Voices That Transform Award for his work as a communicator. He is a Capricorn.
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