[Pride 2022] Freddy Krueger's Christmas Sweater: On Kelly Rowland, cigarette emojis, and the American Flag

I don’t remember the first time I was called a faggot. I’m certain it happened in high school, probably in gym class, but I tend to block out a lot of specifics of those kinds of teenage memories. It wasn’t a fun time.

I do remember the worst time I was called a faggot. It was in 2013, the year after I graduated college. Though I still lived and worked in Pittsburgh, I participated in Homecoming festivities with some friends from out of town. We went to a local bar, the kind of hole-in-the-wall straight bar that thrives on college campuses, and before I realized what was happening, some big, burly guy took the chair of a friend who had just stepped away to use the restroom. He picked her chair right up, turned it around, and sat at the table next to us. He looked like he might ride a motorcycle. He looked like he might like cigars.

“Hey,” I said. “Sorry, that’s taken; our friend’s just in the bathroom.”

The guy rolled his eyes and muttered, “Too bad.” I tried to speak up, hyper-conscious of the tone of my voice and the tight jeans I was wearing. “Excuse me,” I said. “That chair’s not free; can we have it back?”

It wasn’t until others at my table joined in, telling him to return the chair now, that he stood up, turned the chair back around, took one from an empty table nearby, and sat back where he was. And then he said it. “Did you hear that fucking faggot over there?” he asked the people with him. He put on a whining imitation of my voice — which didn’t sound all that much like me, thank you very much. “That chair’s taken. That faggot told me the chair was already taken.”

I tried to ignore it. I tried to focus on chatting with the friends I hadn’t seen in a while. But the word kept coming, over and over. “Wonder why that faggot is even at this bar.” And then, “Wonder if that fucking faggot knows what kind of bar this is.”

Soon I whispered to my closest friends that the guy next to us was making me feel extremely unsafe, and I needed to leave, and I understood if they wanted to stay, but I had to go. The two of them left with me and we went to a nearby gay bar instead. Neither of them had heard what the other guy was saying. One of them told me I was overreacting. Late that night I drunkenly called my parents, crying.

So… I don’t love that word. I know some of us have tried to reclaim it, to call each other fags as a term of endearment, sometimes using a cigarette emoji in place of the actual slur itself. (Get it? Because British?) That’s all well and good. Y’all have fun, as far as I’m concerned. Truly. I’ve done the emoji thing a few times just to see how it felt. Mostly, it felt not-great. I don’t love the way the word feels in my mouth, or in my hands as I type it – even now, writing this.

But, against all odds… you know what does make me laugh? That time in Freddy vs. Jason (2003) when Kelly Rowland called Freddy Krueger a faggot.

It’s the climax of the film. The Springwood Slasher has just chuckled, “Sweet… dark meat” — awful, racist — and has begun advancing on her, knife-glove outstretched, ready to slice and dice her like he’s diced and sliced dozens of teenagers before. And then she says it. “Tell me something,” she asks, walking backwards, red hair shining against the foggy blue night. “What kind of faggot…” Here she pauses, as if to really let it land. “...runs around in a Christmas sweater?” She spits the slur, really meaning it… and she is summarily dispatched.

The film’s screenwriters, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, told Bloody Disgusting that the slur wasn’t their fault. “We didn’t write it, and we were really shocked when we heard it in the movie,” they said, adding, “It’s a real stain on the movie, in our opinion.” Plenty of horror fans agree, and it’s certainly a visceral moment, one with the potential to punch an unsuspecting queer horror fan in the gut.

But… it’s also Kelly Rowland. Destiny’s Child, “Kisses Down Low,” “I think I would be a bird,” “When Love Takes Over” Kelly Rowland. Beyoncé’s bestie, Kelly Rowland. The year before Freddy vs. Jason, she texted Nelly via Microsoft Excel, for Pete’s sake! Right now she commands you to dance! She’s given us so much; the woman is the definition of harmless. There’s something about the moment that really distills what a different time 2003 was, different to the point that Kelly Rowland would think it was fine to ad-lib something like that on set. How can you not be tickled by that, in 2022? 

Being able to laugh at the moment now reminds me how different I was in 2003, when the slur would have pummeled me with how deeply closeted and afraid I was, worried someone would uncover my secret. It reminds me of how different I was in 2013, too, crying on the phone to my parents because even though I was now out, I was still afraid.

And yet. To watch Freddy vs. Jason in 2022 is not just to be reminded of what life was like back then, but also of what it increasingly seems we are backsliding into. Look, the movie is mostly bad. The flaming Jason walking through a cornfield is fun, but unlike most installments in the two franchises, FvJ features embarrassing CGI instead of campy-fun practical effects. Its plot is borderline inexplicable at points, Freddy and Jason teaming up before turning on one another for unclear reasons. (Is it jealousy? I think it might be jealousy?).

But it’s also — oddly, interestingly — very post-9/11. During one scene in a police station, a large portrait of George W. Bush looms over a cop’s shoulder. During the film’s climax, Jason gets repeatedly impaled on an American Flag pole, skewered by Christopher Marquette in a slow-mo hero shot. And the film is, fittingly, about a society coming to terms with the fact that an evil it thought it had defeated, an evil it thought it was safe from, has come back to slaughter them once more, to feed on their fear, to sap them of their strength by making them afraid. It’s surprising that no one explicitly calls Freddy a terrorist.

There was a small moment there where it looked like American nationalism might be waning, years after Freddy vs. Jason, as people increasingly spoke openly about how empty so many of this country’s promises are. But any hope I had for that moment is long gone. I visited my parents last week, spending a week in the same bedroom where I first fell in love with the Friday the 13th series. Across the street from my childhood home, an all-black American flag flutters in the wind, its flagpole bolted to a tree. “Black flags have historically been used to signify that no quarter will be given,” writes The Telegraph. “When translated into modern language, this means that captured enemy combatants will be killed rather than taken prisoner.” The sign below it proclaims the property to be protected by both God and guns.

It was a rough town to grow up in. I knew only two or three out gay kids when I was in high school, but the place where I was first called a faggot now has a Gay/Straight Alliance. I want to believe that the youth are ever-more tolerant; a little after me, they had Glee, and some time after that, TikTok. But the school where some friends and I once secretly passed around paperbacks on queer theory and drag queens, even though some of us still claimed to be straight, also has a coalition of angry parents trying to ban any books that mention queer people. They claim those who try to create community for young queers are actually grooming them for sexual abuse. Someone I went to high school with spoke out against the book-banning at a recent school board meeting, trying to weave them a picture of what life was like before “It Gets Better,” before the legalization of gay marriage nationwide. It was a heartfelt, moving speech, one that brought me to tears because it brought me back, and as he walked to his seat, someone called him a pedophile.

Like the residents of Springwood, I naively thought we had defeated these nightmares, vanquished these monsters. I thought things were looking up, that the trauma and the fear of my past could stay there, preserved in hazy recollections of tearful late-night phone calls and in a clunky line in a horror movie. So that’s why I have to laugh when Kelly Rowland, of all people, calls Freddy Krueger a faggot.

At this point in my life, to do anything but to laugh just lets the fear back in.