I may be your faggot, but I ain’t always your friend

Posso ser seu viado, mas nem sempre sou seu amigo

Abstract

In this reflective essay, the author explores three vignettes inspired by moments tied to queer experience, identity, and community. The first vignette describes a drag performance. The second vignette describes a difficult conversation with a colleague, and the third vignette describes a moment of movement with a queer friend. The vignettes are vehicles for reflection on his own approach to advocacy within occupational therapy, occupational science, and the broader current geopolitical context. Pulling on drag as a performative occupation, faggotry as a disruptive force to oppression, and queer community-building as an abundant methodology for change-making, the author challenges himself and his colleagues to boldly push against oppression and authoritarianism while also evading the pitfalls of performative and passé actions. He attempts to navigate the nuances between risk, repression, and protection while advocating within a field. Acknowledging the influence of privilege and the danger of disruption, the author explores creative coalition building and strategic recognitions that flavor how occupational practitioners and scientists can understand their role in liberation and justice.

Keywords:
Political Activism; Sexual and Gender Minorities; Politics; Queer

Resumo

Neste ensaio reflexivo, o autor explora três vinhetas inspiradas em momentos ligados à experiência, identidade e comunidade queer. A primeira vinheta descreve uma performance drag. A segunda vinheta descreve uma conversa difícil com um colega, e a terceira vinheta descreve um momento de movimento com um amigo queer. As vinhetas servem como veículos para refletir sobre sua própria abordagem de incidência na terapia ocupacional, na ciência ocupacional e no contexto geopolítico contemporâneo mais amplo. Ao mobilizar a drag como uma ocupação performativa, a viadagem como uma força disruptiva contra a opressão e a construção de comunidades queer como uma metodologia abundante para a criação de mudanças, o autor desafia a si mesmo e seus colegas a confrontarem com ousadia a opressão e o autoritarismo, ao mesmo tempo em que evitam as armadilhas de ações performáticas e ultrapassadas. Ele busca navegar pelas nuances entre risco, repressão e proteção ao atuar em militância dentro do campo. Reconhecendo a influência do privilégio e o perigo da disrupção, o autor explora a construção criativa de coalizões e reconhecimentos estratégicos que moldam a forma como profissionais e cientistas ocupacionais podem compreender seu papel na libertação e na justiça.

Palavras-chave:
Ativismo Político; Minorias Sexuais e de Gênero; Política; Queer

I May Be Your Faggot, but I Ain’t Always Your Friend

I pen this reflection situated in the United States of America (US), a recidivist country attempting to lock itself, yet again, into authoritarianism and war. I do not pretend this is a new or shocking place for us to be. Anyone who has read US history can see the patterns drawn in our culture. What we also read in that history – that many attempt to erase or downplay – are the moments where patterns of white supremacy, colonization, war mongering, and dehumanization are disrupted, disrupted by humans who refuse to be less or see their community members as less. Liberation finds itself between the hands of those who reach out to each other and disrupt. In this reflection, I hope to instigate disruption and encourage connection within occupational therapy and science. I hope you, dear reader, will take my words and see them as invitation to hold me, my government, your government, our science, our practice, our colleagues, and our world accountable by disrupting bravely and connecting abundantly. As fodder for reflection on this work, I offer three of my own lived experiences via vignettes from my own journaling, often an amalgamation of various moments in my life: 1) Drag, 2) Being a Faggot, and 3) Queer Community.

Drag

Black triangles drip from her eyes, accented by white eye shadow powdering her cheeks. Simple yet striking make up, reminiscent of a cabaret, contrasts an elegant yet raw ensemble of intricate black lace tights, a flowing see-through blouse with witch-length sleeves, and a black leotard dipping well below her chest. Her hand reaches out, fingers quivering in parallel to lips trembling over operatic lyrics. Black panties hold unpadded hips as bony knees bend inward severely and artistically, managing 6-inch sparkling silver platform heels. Her face contorted in exaggerated sadness and pain. A sheer black wig cap creates a bald silhouette, inviting focus on large silver hoop earrings with single large pearls – tears – at their lowest point. A single strand of pearls thrown around her neck sways with her movements, debating whether to collide with a silver teardrop hanging from a single chain below her sternum. Her lip-sync pulls the words into her mouth while sadness and melancholy pour out. The audience is silent, entranced by a dark ode to sorrow. She holds space for loss, for agony, while wrapping her onlookers in a warmth of artistic production. She contests the pop-centric entertainment of other performers, reminding her queer subjects of the realities of our world while constructing a space of solidarity and community. She acknowledges the pain with tears while igniting possibilities with her performance. She reminds us of who we are – and must be – to survive.

Footholds while climbing toward liberation are precarious. Since drag entered the mainstream and became commercialized, connoisseurs of drag – if I may call myself as such – have witnessed tension emerge between the subaltern origins of the art and its newfound station in pop culture (Wignall & McCormack, 2021). Some fear it has lost its disruptive, political nature (Greenough, 2025) while others see its werk¹ continuing to navigate broader and more complex cultural currents (Meisner et al., 2025). A professional drag performer with a perfect outfit and sculpted designer hair walking around a queer bar collecting tips in West Hollywood, lip-syncing unenthusiastically to a pop diva’s iconic anthem: hardly disruptive and borderline passé. That same performer on a national stage in front of millions of people who have never seen drag before: an image that could very well save an isolated queer teen’s life. A performer disrupting the increasingly common pop-diva performance in a gay bar with one focused on agony and sadness, silencing a queer crowd rather than craving their cheers: a necessary disruption in that space.

Land acknowledgments, critical theorizing, identitarian positionalities, and decolonizing strategies, in the science or practice, are all performances (Robinson et al., 2019; Spicer et al., 2016; Tuck & Yang, 2012). In some instances, a disruptive, necessary, and important performance of deeply liberatory practices – please read that sentence again. In other moments, they can be a show put on only to entertain the crowd. Considering the complexities of drag has challenged me to examine my own performance. Where, for example, am I performing criticality to colleagues who already agree that discussing racism in occupational science and therapy education is necessary instead of turning to more obstinate opponents to defend this curriculum within institutions seeking to hide racism’s harm? Am I spending minutes listing my identities and positionalities among those who understand the intersectional nature of power instead of challenging those same colleagues to take more concrete action to adjust those inequities? When am I simply collecting tips to a pop anthem instead of rooting around in the heart of cultural norms, performing for applause rather than disruption? Let me be clear; performance is important and necessary – but its value is relational and dependent on its direct impact on the structures creating oppression in the first place. We must take time and exercise intentional understanding to determine how or whether the performance we plan will achieve real change in research, education, practice, and/or our world.

Passé performances are wasted in spaces that demand more unsettling questions. In our world, practice, and science today, more unsettling performances are required. Yet those same passé performances can be valuable elsewhere. This is a difficult and sometimes contradictory reality. Mobilizing critical perspectives within the science is valuable. Pausing critique to take concrete yet imperfect actions in collaboration with people of differing perspectives – yet more or less aligned –to respond to growing repression of intellectual freedom may be a deeper performance. Land acknowledgments at conferences are important. Deeper performance might be working with research societies to take more political action on censorship and academic freedom for Indigenous and marginalized scholars who continue to endure epistemic oppression. Hosting workshops on cultural humility is important. Training colleagues on how to disrupt unlawful detention of Latine students or patients at universities and hospitals in the US is a more unsettling performance. Standing on the corner holding “No Kings” signs² in a city that professes to be “progressive” builds community but strategizing with activists to identify materially disruptive actions to curb growing systemic authoritarianism is likely a deeper and more difficult performance.

Performance gives us power; we hold a stage. Particularly, as a scholar situated in the US, I feel spurred to take the stage full-heartedly and perform boldly while avoiding the passé, moving deeper toward disruption and concrete change for liberation in different and varied approaches. This is not easy.

Being a Faggot

Her nose twitches as she lies to my face. My heart is beating quickly as my empty smile accompanies narrowed eyes, discussing the way forward. My hands shake as I take notes on this side of the video call – I’m glad she can’t see my tremoring. The corners of our lips dare the other’s to lower. I am trying my best to be a version of friendly. Energetic tone and canned niceties lap at the stone wall of my masked gaze, spraying a bit of confusion and frustration back onto her pale face. I reiterate the question with a bit more sass and smile. She evades again, offering tangential facts and tissue paper excuses. Anxiety rises in my throat. Her southern “sweethearts” are met with my flaming “ma’ams” - shiny privilege met with shady determination. I can feel my wrist bend further as my patience dissipates into her ignorance. Her eyes begin to register that – in fact – queer ears are immune to her ladylike charm. My eyes realize change may require different tactics. I ask even more directly, this time without the fake smile but with some femme attitude. She relents that she cannot answer the question… “…without admitting the harm being done,” I finish her sentence. Her smile is gone. My heart is pumping. Thirty minutes of me seems to be her limit. Thirty minutes of her was more than sufficient. She stares, “I think this call is over.”

“The call may be over, but the conversation will need to continue.” A bit shakier than I hoped, but it got the point across.

If the use of the term faggot startled you, it was meant to. This term is used in many ways in the queer community. One such instance is when queerness emerges at the frontline of disruption (Wheeler, 2020). For queer – particularly but not exclusively gay male – people in the US at least, we endearingly name each other faggot when we see a sister lean into her queerness. We see the disruption sparked by an intentional gesture of a hand, an exaggerated swish of the hip, or a purposefully overt sexual act. That’s a faggot. The honorific identifies moments when queerness leads the charge toward liberation, celebrating while protecting. We see a femme gay man defending himself, friend, or stranger on the train by turning his fairy up. We see a butch lesbian grab at their crotch and spit at construction workers catcalling them or their friend. We see a femme them with a beard strut proudly into a “women’s” lingerie store and make their purchase from gawking, awkward cashiers. We bestow the name to commend unapologetic queerness. That’s being a faggot.

Yet this queerness is cultivated at the intersection of survival and celebration. We would not be faggots if an unjust world had not first stigmatized our existence. Accepting ourselves to spite violence is where faggotry is found. Faggots reveal injustice with shade, bigotry with camp. Nellies³ demand attention with flaming gestures and light loafers⁴. Uncoincidentally, our queerness also jars the word from the mouths of bigots and queerphobic people. When our existence disrupts their habits, inconveniences everyday routines, or simply takes them by surprise – this word, or at minimum its sentiment, is at-the-ready. Bigots see an insult; we see acclamation. When queerness holds a mirror up to oppression, the faggots and our friends are at play.

When you have the privilege, safety, or desperation, as my friend and colleague, Dr. Holly Reid, says, at least “have an affair with faggotry” (February 27, 2026). For those of us with more privilege, risk should be less restrictive. Pursuing liberation is always disruptive. Stonewall did not start by throwing a wig⁵. Disruption will not be comfortable and those who reinforce oppression will not be happy. Upset the “reasonable” status quo by unapologetically siding with liberation in your occupational therapy practice, research, education, and life. This may mean being unfaithful to our sacred term of “occupation” or, better yet, disobedient to oppressors in general (Lenette, 2025). This does not mean to pick up the tools of the oppressor: hatred, dehumanization, hegemony. Being a faggot does not mean being an asshole. Instead, accept that an oppressive system does not change without discomfort for those it benefits. Insults, consequences, and retributions thrown back are inevitable, meant to scare us into quiet acquiescence built on self-hatred and isolation.

By privilege or desperation, wear the insults as a shield. Still listen, understand, empathize with those reinforcing oppression – it harms them too – but do not believe in a comfortable way of changing the system. Ask hard questions about what your institutions’ endowments are funding, how hospital policies are exploiting employees, why academic journal leadership does not seem to change, or what (and who) your book publishers are extracting – do not back down to tissue paper excuses or status quo arguments. Be clear when you challenge racism in a treatment session. Be frank when you critique problematic or low-quality literature in the science. Be direct when you address a misogynist conference presentation. Be firm when you challenge corporate exploitation of productivity standards and unpaid work. Be unapologetic when you move with other practitioners to pressure national and international organizations and governments to act – not just make statements – against genocide. In fact, be honest with yourself: occupational science and occupational therapy are small pieces of a much larger performance; your energy may be better spent elsewhere or with broader coalition-building to address oppressive systems.

We too often sacrifice liberation for harmony, niceties, and social etiquette. True faggots do not hate, but we do disrupt. We have learned that disruption is a sister to liberation. Our disruption usually does not equal likeability. I may be your faggot, but that also means I ain’t always your friend.

Queer Community

Sweat mixes across skin as our forearms caress each other. Damp with humidity in the room and warm with the exertion of our movements, my fingers find his wrists, wrapping for stability and communication. Standing wide and closing our eyes, the rhythm moves us together. His chest at my back, we bend our knees, leaning forward and lowering into an embrace. Heads down, we breathe, listen, feel, prepare. In an arching gesture, we reach outward together claiming the space around us. We graze others, cueing them to move out of our way. On a dancefloor crowded with stiff swaying and self-conscious gaze, we expand our presence, our liberation. Stepping to the side, his arm pulls across my shoulders. Sweat drips as we find each other face to face. My hand reaches his opposite shoulder, trailing down his arm. We grasp each other’s forearm leaning back to take risk and space with us as we go. Smiling as we test the limits of our 30 something year old knees, the music vibrates our hearts and souls. We look upward into flashing lights, supporting each other’s daring positions, laughing at the queer world we create while risking collapse.

While the argument I hope to convey in this reflection may be prickly in parts, its root is a stern belief in the possibility of liberation for all from oppression. Queer community has gifted me this obstinate optimism. Throughout history, queer people have made space for liberation in the face of religious, cultural, psychological, medical, and internal oppression (Beemyn, 1997). Even when every sensation and system is commanding us to stay silent, conform to the norm, or understand ourselves to be evil, a spark of liberation grows in a soul, reaches out to another and ignites liberation between us. We move together to hold safety, creativity, passion, and gentleness amongst us, shelter in a typhoon of cisheteronormativity. We learn to dance between the factors and systems clawing to control us – but we continue to dance together.

A gift of queerness is recognizing that our mere existence disrupts. We have stared into the mirror praying we were not a disruption to society. We have consoled our own parents as they struggle with having a queer child. We have pulled from the attic the portrait society tried to paint of us, revealing not a corpse drowning in shame and sin, but a glowing, magnificent fairy. For we have learned that “those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming” (Wilde, 1891/2006, p. 1). Queerness understands disruption to be inevitable. Some by choice and some for survival, we learn to wield our disruption together as a shield against social and psychological harm. When we trouble oppression together, it becomes easier to manage. Our skin, patience, and relationships grow thicker as our disruption wakes more people around us; slowly disruption becomes community.

Violence and subjugation are festering in our communities. For some, therefore, disruption does not feel worth the risk. Unemployment, violence, jail, or even death may wait on the other side of disruption. To these, I say liberation dies in isolation; together, we can and must creatively disrupt while considering and protecting those at the most vulnerable intersectionalities (Reid et al., 2025). If we do not, they nonetheless remain at risk. Some may be fearful that their disruption is “too much”, unwarranted, or ultimately off-target. To these I say, better to disrupt and respond to readjustment and feedback from your community than to allow oppression to stand safely behind niceness.

We must surge toward spaces, scholars, actions, and communities where liberation has found its stronghold. Write with them. Prioritize publications regarding them. Stand with them in the street. Build disruptive coalitions to challenge the systems threatening to cage us. Boldly disrupt the patterns of our culture, practice, and scholarship that would silence these havens. Build them by joining them. Find the sweaty arms you can hold to create a new world while risking collapse.

Finding Faggotry

I have not always been brave. I have often failed in performing concrete action for liberation. There are issues I name in this essay that I have been hesitant to speak on. We must give grace while expecting accountability. Yet, I say now is the time for disruption. I certainly am not suggesting that white straight women prance around calling themselves faggots (please don’t), but - by all means - borrow from our repertoire of faggotry. Throw etiquette aside in pursuit of liberation. When I have bravely been a faggot, my hands shake. My heart pounds. It is not comfortable being disruptive. The stage feels treacherous and the performance feels both vulnerable yet defiant. But when my shaking hand steadies in the palm of a friend, performing liberation together, I believe we can make a difference. If I have learned anything from queer community, drag, and being a faggot, it is that survival sometimes means spectacle and liberation requires laying bear the radical realities of our experience. When we are bold, together, disruption becomes optimism. Community becomes security. Honesty becomes accountability. Coalition becomes change.

Acknowledgements

Tens across the board to my co-conspirators and queer community collaborators who helped shape this essay including, Seth Mitchell, Dr. Lauren Selingo, Dr. Khalilah Johnson, Dr. Leiha Edmonds, Dr. Holly Reid, and Barb Lavalley Benton. I am immensely grateful for our conversations, accountability, and joy.

¹

This spelling of “werk” is historically rooted in African American Vernacular English, was made popular through queer ballroom culture, and is often used in queer coded communication to signify an empowered, performative mode of expression, beauty, and excellence.

²

“‘No Kings’ signs” references recent US nationwide anti‑authoritarian demonstrations that drew millions into highly visible protests but largely were symbolic with limited policy impact.

³

An older term for homosexual men most popular in the 1940s and 50s in the US

⁴

An older common saying in the US for more visibly femme presenting gay men; they are “light in their loafers”, loafers referencing a common shoe type.

⁵

The Stonewall Riots (1969) are the popularly accepted initiating event of the queer liberation movement in the US – although previous queer-led, anti-police brutality riots did occur. The Stonewall riots are said to have been started by a trans drag performer throwing a brick.

How to cite:

Lavalley, R. (2026). I may be your faggot, but I ain’t always your friend. Cadernos Brasileiros de Terapia Ocupacional, 34, e4453. https://doi.org/10.1590/2526-8910.cto445944532

Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, upon reasonable request.

References

• Beemyn, G. (1997). Creating a place for ourselves: lesbian, gay, and bisexual community histories Oxfordshire: Routledge.
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• Lenette, C. (2025). Being disruptive, disobedient, and unfaithful: anti-colonial framing in creative research. Journal of Creative Research Methods, 1(1), 139-144. https://doi.org/10.1332/30502969Y2025D000000002
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• Reid, H., Leite Junior, J. D., Rudman, D. L., & Huot, S. (2025). Integrating intersectionality into occupation based research: reflections on methodological challenges and potential. Cadernos Brasileiros de Terapia Ocupacional, 33, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1590/2526-8910.cto412740522
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• Robinson, D., Hill, K. J. C., Ruffo, A. G., Couture, S., & Ravensbergen, L. C. (2019). Rethinking the practice and performance of indigenous land acknowledgement. Canadian Theatre Review, 177(1), 20-30.
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• Wignall, L., & McCormack, M. (2021). Drag performers’ perspectives on the mainstreaming of british drag: towards a sociology of contemporary drag. Sociology, 56(1), 3-20.
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Corresponding author

Ryan Lavalley e-mail: [e-mail]

Section editor

Profa. Dra. Ana Paula Serrata Malfitano

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  07 Sept 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  12 May 2026
• Accepted
  05 Aug 2026