The day my son learned that faggot is not just a schoolyard taunt

I will never forget the first time my son was called a faggot. It will be forever burned into my memory as a very traumatic experience – for both my son and for me. And in no way was that word used as a “schoolyard taunt” or a “joke” as Ann Coulter would like everyone to believe.

It happened 11 years ago when my son was 10 years old. Our family had just moved back to Arizona and into a new home in a new development. My husband and I purposely chose a new neighborhood because we believed that would be a great way for our children to ease in and make new friends. Everyone would essentially be in the same boat as a new kid on the block. And there would not yet be established friendships, cliques, or baseball teams. They would be getting in on the ground floor so to speak. Our plan definitely had its advantages, but as we were soon to find out, it also had some disadvantages too.

Every evening after dinner the kids would all rush out the door to congregate outside and talk, get to know one another, and basically size each other up. But it was also a time for some of the new boys in the neighborhood to start marking their territory and establishing their place in the pecking order.

As each new home was completed, a new family would move in and that evening the ritual among the kids would begin anew: “congregate’, “size up the new kids”, and further “refine the pecking orders”. New families were moving in at a fairly regular pace and the neighborhood was quickly becoming a vibrant melting pot of people from all over the country.

One week a new family with 3 kids moved in a few houses down from us. One of the kids in that family was a girl about the same age as my middle son. Not long after they had moved in, my middle son was standing in this family’s driveway having a conversation with this young girl. Unfortunately, this did not set well with some of the boys in the neighborhood. I suppose they felt he’d overstepped some unwritten boundary they’d set by talking to the new girl before they’d had a chance to strut their stuff and make an impression on her.

Before my son knew what was happening, he was quickly surrounded by about 5 or 6 boys who’d figured out the perfect way to make an impression on this little girl and teach my son a lesson at the same time. The first boy stepped forward, shoved my son hard, almost knocking him to the ground. Before he had a chance to recover another boy came at him, grabbed him by the shirt collar and called him a faggot, while at the same time a third boy came up from behind and pulled my son’s shorts down exposing his underwear in front of this girl. The others began closing in and it was clear at that point that their intention was to escalate this whole thing to the next level. Just as my son was bracing for the first blow, the new girl’s mother came outside to see what was going on and the bullies scattered like cowards for cover. My dazed son quickly headed home, frightened, horrified, and mortified. He had no idea what he’d done to deserve what had just happened and he quickly decided in his 10-year-old line of reasoning that Arizona was a very bad place and he no longer wanted to live here.

When he walked through the door that evening, I knew something was terribly wrong. He didn’t want to tell me, but when I prodded him, he spilled the whole story. I cannot put into words the gamut of emotions I was feeling. It was a mixture of rage and fear. And when he told me they’d called him a faggot, I felt sick to my stomach.

It took Herculean efforts to hide those emotions from my son. I was overwhelmed by a desire to march out that door and find every one of those punks and show them what it feels like to be bullied by someone bigger than them, but instead I put my arms around my son and told him that there will always be bullies in this world. I explained that they are usually very insecure people who have a terrible sense of inadequacy and they compensate for that inadequacy by hurting others and temporarily getting a rush of superiority from it. It went way over my 10-year-old’s head. He simply wanted to know what he’d done to deserve such cruel treatment and when we were moving back to Minnesota.

That word, faggot, was not intended to be a “schoolyard taunt” or a joke that day. That word was intended to be the prelude to violence, with my son as the intended target. That word was a weapon. It was used to demean and hurt my son and it accomplished both goals. To this day, when I hear that word it evokes intense emotions within me. I will never forget the terror, the rage, or the hurt that word inflicted on my son and on me.

Watching Ann Coulter stand up on that stage in all her cutesy, smarmy, smug glory and spout that word brought back all that rage I felt 11 years ago. She did it for the benefit of her overly receptive crowd and they loved it, but I’ve really got to wonder how many parents had the same reflexive reaction I did. We know the impact that word has, we know it first hand. And something tells me Ann Coulter knows its impact too, and that’s why she used it.

She is worse than those bullies who ganged up on my son. They were kids, she is not. It is a very pathetic human being who can only make their mark in this world by demeaning others, or only be funny at the expense of others, or only feel adequate when they are making others feeling inadequate, but that seems to sum up Ann Coulter’s shtick in a nutshell. Like I told my little boy that day 11 years ago, there will always be bullies in this world. Ann Coulter is one of those bullies.