Zionist is the New Faggot
Sometimes The Haters Really Do Have a Point
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There are only three things that every gay man has in common:
We’ve fallen in love with a boy that couldn’t love us back.
We’ve had to find the words to tell someone who we really are.
We’ve had a pickup truck drive by and yell “faggot” at us.
As a gay man of a certain age, I’ve lived through several lifetimes of social acceptance for our people. I remember when “known homosexual” was printed in bold type in the police blotter as gay men were arrested and fired from their jobs. When it was written between the lines — “survived by his parents, survived by his longtime companion” — as obituary after obituary crowded those same pages. When DOMA became Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell became Prop 8, became Obergefell became Mayor Pete, became book bans, and bathroom bans and transition bans and drag queen story hour.
All along, I’ve still been that same queer…before I had the words to say it.
To come out as a gay person though, you need to master the skill of owning your “otherness”; it is generally not passed down to you by your parents. You have to decide on the words, the timing and their personal importance. Everyone’s journey is different, but if we want to live openly as ourselves, we have to be able to say the three hardest words in English:
“Mom, I’m gay.”
I remember when I said this out loud to her over a schnitzel at our favorite restaurant. She cried a lot.
It was hard to do, but in retrospect I’m not 100% sure why. Sure, the AIDS crisis and my parents’ divorce played a role. But my mom and dad had also taught us to be fiercely proud of who we were. My family survived the Nazi death camps and fled the oppression of post-war communism. They were fond of saying that they defected so “we could give you kids the freedom we never had.” They were also fond of saying, “haven’t we done enough?” whenever asked for a trendy toy, so there’s that.
Our pride centered on our Jewishness, which was something we were told to never hide and always embrace. This also included Zionism, which was self-evidently indivisible from my Judaism. I never really learned the language of expressing and affirming my belief in the right to a Jewish homeland because that was the world I grew up in. It was self-evident. It was everywhere, in everyone. I believed it was part of all people’s inherent yearning for a safe and secure homeland. Zionism just was.
Declaring myself a Jewish Zionist therefore seemed as obvious and reductive as reminding everyone that I’m a gay man who really likes Madonna or a Canadian who is fond of maple syrup. Not necessarily in that order, or together. And I honestly just never thought of Zionism as a part of my identity, certainly not the way the words “I’m proudly gay” or “I’m proudly Jewish” became part of my regular lexicon in professional, personal and online contexts.
Not that long ago, it was inconceivable to put “proud” in front of Fag, Queer, Gay or even Homosexual. These words have been interchangeable slurs for at least a century, hurled at us in the locker room or on the street right before a punch was thrown. Gay wasn’t Good. Queer wasn’t Cool, and Faggot wasn’t Fabulous. Today however, their meanings have shifted because we gays started using them in a positive way. Linguists call this process Reclamation, and it has been studied extensively in many minorities beyond just LGBTQ folks.
So it’s been very interesting to see the left push so hard to contaminate the word Zionist over the past few years, and with increasing intensity since the Hamas atrocities of October 7th.
If you believe leftist social media or campus protests, Zionism is tantamount to Nazism or Eugenics (though never, it seems, Marxism) in its inherent evil. Taking an unsurprisingly treasonous cue from Iranian, Palestinian and Islamist groups that use Zionist as the code word for Israel and Jews, these folks have made an aggressive effort to rebrand the phrase as an identity that deserves scorn or elimination.
These fine people have taken to confronting us on subways, in restaurants, on campuses and elsewhere demanding to know if we are Zionists before letting us pass. They’ve tried to add exclusionary language to job descriptions and courses, public and academic spaces, and even encouraged unions, conferences and affinity groups to ban Zionists from participation.
I can’t help but think about this evolution of the word Zionist and its relationship to the word queer. In my lifetime, I’ve seen queer used similarly: as an epithet, a description of evil, a corrupting force that is coming for your children, something dark and malign that is slowly destroying the world. Morality campaigners used the threat of queerness to keep gay folks out of schools, workplaces, the government and the public sphere.
Over time, Queer (with a capital Q) also became a cudgel to separate the “good gays” from the bad ones. The good ones, of course, kept a low profile. The Queers were wild and weird — intellectual, anarchic, energetic, angular. The Queers fought back. They didn’t just move in the shadows, they found their light and claimed it. “You’re ok, you’re not one of those Queers,” was a pretty common refrain as the fight for gay rights became more popular and contentious.
Gays reclaimed our slurs because we’ve always loved to turn a phrase…and a lewk. After all, we even invented our own secret language that straights unwittingly use every day. But without our bullies we might never have had to be this creative.
Back in the day, we used all kinds of euphemisms to refer to each other (Mary, Friend of Dorothy, Queen) but rarely called each other queer, gay, homosexual or faggot unless it was in some artistic, campy or legal context. But the more we were insulted and the less shame we felt, the more we wanted to use that language on our terms. Our haters named us, and we embraced it.
The left’s desire to pollute the word Zionist is, it seems, having much the same effect. Instead of making most Jews cower and renounce their Zionism, it appears to be pushing many to embrace this part of themselves.
Just as we knew that our childhood bully’s taunts on the playground only have energy if we’re genuinely insecure about the slur, Jews worldwide are waking up, asking themselves if they are Zionists, and — in the main — realizing they are. More importantly, we’re saying we’re not ashamed of it. And the more they hurl the insult, the more we’re embracing its use, and the less powerful it will become. Because that’s how this works.
To be sure, some number of Jews have made anti-Zionism a big part of their post October 7th personality. But these token Jews are no different in number or impact than the gays who refused to be lumped in with drag queens and trans activists post Stonewall. That is to say, they’re making a distinction they think will appease the “moral majority”, while missing the big picture: they actually do hate you for who you are, not how you act in public.
Just as the “moral majority” helped us reclaim Queer and Fag and launched a gay rights movement, these rabid leftists may unleash a beast they didn’t count on.
Zionism could become the new term for many people’s dream and yearning for a safe, secure homeland where they can be free from oppression and persecution. Ultimately, it could be the umbrella word for ensuring the safety of the Armenians, Rohingya, Romani, Uighurs, Taiwanese, Druze, Copts, Kurds and countless other oppressed or threatened groups the world over searching for or defending their home — dreaming of peace?
After all, the Israeli example is — while not without its flaws — a model for the dispossessed. Turning barrenness into wealth and prosperity, building a thriving democratic society where nothing of the sort existed for millenia, and defending oneself against enemies even while the world questions your right to exist. That’s something we should all get behind.
And I suspect that if antisemitism had not been primal you’d see Israel today leading a community of like-minded indigenous peoples working for self-determination. I believe that may yet be possible, and would be a good thing for the state to do as a PR and alliance strategy. You may already notice many supporters of Israel among the most ardent indigenous rights advocates. Perhaps it’s time for our own Belt and Road Initiative connecting us all. I’ll throw out Borscht & Rugelach or Borekas & Ravikos for the name ideas.
And what is the word “Zion” but a representation of the garden of eden itself. It is a return to peace and comfort that is eternal and plentiful. It’s the place all people yearn to enter — and a word that exists in several religions as a talisman of this idea. It’s not a coincidence that Mormons use it to refer to the notion of a unified people and heart, and its presence in the Koran and several other texts holds important metaphorical and literal significance.
Imagine what would happen if the Palestinians themselves embraced the ideas of zionism (lower case z) instead of the self-defeating death cults they’ve too frequently cozied up to. Perhaps it would allow them the confidence to believe they can live in peace, cheek-by-jowl, centered in their right to be present, healthy and safe. Maybe they’d understand they can enter the kingdom of heaven on earth without needing to destroy those who live next door.
Or what if other peoples decided to be queer (small Q), in much the same way Israel is the queer of the Middle East. And no, I’m not talking about Israel’s expansive and unique freedoms for LGBTQ people.
Today, Israel is the queer of its neighborhood. It’s got a very different population, values and trajectory. It’s the James Baldwin in a sea of Harper Lee’s — assertive in its intellect, doing the screaming and yelling and intellectual brick throwing, and unafraid to be itself even when everyone (and it does seem everyone) is telling it to conform. It sometimes resorts to fisticuffs, but — as our gay elders so eloquently put it — “We’re Here. We’re Queer. Get Used to It.”
Indeed, everywhere in the world you see a little island of queerness, you can infer a little zionism was once present, too. Think Singapore, Armenia, Hungary, Taiwan and Eswatini as classic examples. But imagine an independent Kurdistan, Rohingyaland, Uyghurstan or even Palestine in our not-too-distant future. To bring them to fruition they need to embrace their queerness and their zionism.
Regardless of our identity, we may wrap ourselves in former slurs today with comfort. Many gays — including some of my friends — are still uncomfortable with defining themselves as queer. And that’s ok. After all the abuse hurled at them for just wanting to be who they are, their yearning to be free and safe in their homeland over the rainbow, maybe they’ll never be comfortable embracing the slurs of their abusers.
All told, we’ll probably never stop loving people who don’t love us back. And we are likely to live out our days still getting yelled at by someone we don’t know, trying to take our power and identity and use it against us. For all of us who are just a little bit different, this will probably always be true.
Just the other day, as my friends and I were walking down the street in West Hollywood to the halloween parade, a man yelled at us from his car:
“That’s why I voted for Trump, so he can deal with you faggots.”
Fourteen year old me would have pretended nothing happened and cried later. Twenty something me would have fumed with my friends and internalized the hatred. Older, wiser, more confident me just looked at him and said,
“Yeah, we’re faggots. Want some, baby?”
I’m here. I’m Queer. I’m Zionist. And if you think long and hard enough about it, you probably are a little bit, too.
