For the first time in a dozen years, I woke up this morning wondering whether I was a faggot.

See, Eric is trying to figure out what Ann Coulter’s explanation of her remark at CPAP would mean if applied consistently:

At any event, it would seem that Ann Coulter is urging upon us the following, very novel definition of “faggot.”

• Correct usage: a) a schoolboy who is considered by another schoolboy to be “weak or timid” and b) pretty much every Democratic politician — male or female, specifically including Hillary Clinton. (Um, does Bubba know?)

• Incorrect usage: any homosexual.

While I guess I should be glad that Ann Coulter has taken it upon herself to unburden homosexuals from the yoke of this rather unpleasant word (as well as change the word’s gender), there’s that stubborn common-sense part of me that just doesn’t quite understand.

…

There was a time not that long ago when calling a heterosexual man a faggot was the worst insult you could bestow on him. It was considerably worse than calling him a “wuss,” and that’s because not all wusses are homosexuals. According to the popular stereotype prevalent at the time, however, all homosexuals were wusses. So, if you called someone a faggot, it carried extra weight.

Now we are told it no longer does, because the word “faggot” does not carry the imputation of homosexuality. It only means “wuss” — and the “wuss” factor is completely detached from the gay factor.

Hmm. Maybe I’m not the best judge, but I don’t think I mince or flounce or anything. And I think I’m good at facing problems squarely and doing what needs to be done about them. Does that mean I’m a homosexual non-faggot? I’m pretty sure that fantasizing about Bobby Cannavale makes me a homo; could the specific things I fantasize about doing with Bobby Cannavale push me back over the line into faggotry? Will I become a faggot again if I wear purple three days in a row (no difficult feat given my closet)? Does it matter whether it’s plum or lilac?

This is all very disorienting, so to speak. Next thing you know, someone’s going to tell me I’m not actually a bitch.

I never figured Coulter was anti-gay*. I have friends who’ve seen her out having drinks or dinner with prominent artfags, for one thing. And for another…well, generally speaking, a lot of loudmouthed, high-strung, unmarried urban professional women are fag hags. I’m pretty sure she’s against gay marriage and abolishing the DADT policy in the military, but those are specific policy positions, not overarching attitudes. Not that I gave it much thought.

Now, of course, it’s suddenly become impossible to open a browser without encountering a solemn discussion of what exactly Coulter meant when she mentioned John Edwards and the word faggot in close proximity to each other. Her explanation strikes me as sincere. “You can’t understand the joke I was trying to make without bearing in mind that I operate at the developmental level of a second-grader” sounds about right, doesn’t it?

So while I think she’s wrong about the way the word is used in contemporary American English by adults, I wasn’t particularly offended. I agree with Connie that fetishizing words is a bad idea, and I think it’s especially bad in this case. The last thing we need as gays is to look yet again as if we were easily-bruised creatures who need to be protected from hurt by big, strong, kind-hearted straight people. (See, for example, that letter a bunch of conservatives wrote in protest, as posted by Michael: “Coulter’s vicious word choice tells the world she care little about the feelings of a large group that often feels marginalized and despised.” Even conservatives are bleating about marginalization now? Ick. And people wonder why I cling to the designation “small-l libertarian”!)

* We’re still allowed to use gay to mean “homosexual,” right? Or are we now to be treated to a revival of the pseudo-Mencken mewling that it’s some kind of crime against English expression that you have to find other ways to talk about the gamesome and happy-go-lucky nowadays?

This weekend, the delivery guy brought an envelope bearing those three little words every gay man loves to hear: “Unframed art enclosed.” A present for my birthday (today–exactly ten years younger than Taylor Dayne) from my old roommate in New York. Of course, since I haven’t found a new apartment yet–in the middle of looking–it’s going to stay enclosed and unframed for a bit.

In less aesthetically pleasing news, Empress Michiko is suffering from stress-induced intestinal bleeding. (Irreverent question: if they’re the intestines of the sitting empress, do we call them 御腸–miwata, maybe? Seems like a word that might do nicely in a waka written by her exalted husband to celebrate her recovery.) I’m being flippant about the level of detail, but of course the condition is serious enough. For those who might have thought that Princess Masako’s adjustment problems were the kind of thing that might iron itself out in a decade or three, the example of the empress, who’s been beset by stress-related ailments pretty regularly, sadly offers little hope. Empress Michiko was also a commoner before marrying Akihito. She wasn’t an up-and-coming diplomat like Masako, but she was the active daughter of a rich industrialist and lived a varied life.

Japan and the DPRK will be discussing the abductee issue and possible normalization of relations between the two countries. You will not be surprised to hear that it’s Japan that wants to know what happened to the remainder of its abducted citizens and the DPRK that wants money:

Japanese and North Korean delegations agreed Tuesday to discuss the abduction issue on Wednesday and diplomatic normalization Thursday during a two-day bilateral working group meeting within the framework of the six-party talks.

The two sides agreed during informal talks Tuesday that the two sides would separately discuss “pending issues including the abduction issue” on Wednesday and “normalization” on Thursday.

The government welcomed the fact that the North Korean side agreed to first discuss the issue of the abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korea, as Pyongyang has claimed the issue has already been settled. The government hopes to see some progress during the Wednesday talks.

I guess we’ll know by the end of the day.

One nice thing about being on vacation was that during the inclement weather and the flights, I had time to read without that nagging feeling that I should be doing something for the office instead. The books I chose were worth investing time in, though I thought they both felt kind of short of what I’d hoped.

One was Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne , a themed biography of sorts by Australian reporter Ben Hills. I don’t remember seeing any egregious factual mistakes, though there were little inaccuracies and self-contradictions; but I was distracted by the way Hills has trouble controlling his voice. There are writers who can move from journalistic sobriety to flippancy to human-interest bathos with ease; Hills isn’t one of them. Sure, that’s subjective on my part, but when the meat of a book is speculation–as an attempt at explicating how the forces operating on Masako got her into her current state necessarily is–its author needs to come off as unusually trustworthy and sensible. The swings in tone are jarring and subliminally make Hills seem a bit flighty.

I was also a little unsettled at the unremittingly flat way Masako was cast as a victim. One doesn’t want to underestimate the way the royals in Japan are treated by their handlers as living museum pieces, which Hills is hardly the first to document. (Under pressure from the palace governing agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kodansha isn’t going to publish the planned Japanese translation.) But as he himself notes, plenty of other eligible women turned down the opportunity to marry Crown Prince Naruhito. I was especially charmed by those unnamed candidates who threatened to make themselves unfit to be royal brides by getting body piercings or tattoos–never underestimate the resourcefulness of the Japanese woman!

Naruhito’s mistake seems to have been in promising Masako that she could channel her talent for and credentials in diplomacy into modernizing the role of the Crown Princess and, later, Empress; Masako’s mistake was in believing him. Even so, she was an experienced woman of the world by that point and presumably knew how to weigh her options. She also had the example of the current Empress Michiko to learn from. No, she probably didn’t know exactly what she was getting into–otherwise, it’s hard to imagine that she would have accepted the prince’s proposal. But part of being an adult who makes a risky decision is that you might lose.

Princess Masako was better than Jimmy Stewart: A Biography , which I picked up while hanging out with Eric. I was distracted by Marc Eliot’s inability to do basic math and by his factual errors. (For a gay man, I’m hardly a film expert, but I’m pretty sure that if Auntie Mame had won the Oscar for Best Picture, I’d have remembered. It’s also pretty obvious that you can’t say Cary Grant retired from acting a half-decade before making North by Northwest .) And to read Eliot’s summaries of Stewart’s own movies with Hitchcock, you’d never know how deeply, powerfully disturbing they are. In fact, nothing Eliot writes indicates why Stewart was a fascinating enough character to warrant a four-hundred-page biography.

Cruel but so, so true.