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At the cottage of Anne Hathaway, which is in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, which is in Warwickshire County, which is in the West Midlands, which is in England, which is in the United Kingdom, a portly tour guide points to a fireplace in the kitchen.
"This is where they burned the faggots."
She continues with the tour. "Here is the bed, his second best, which William Shakespeare gave his dear wife Anne. Notice how it is short. In those times, they slept not flat on their backs, but somewhere between upright and reclining. This was out of an old fear: if Lucifer saw one lying flat, he would think one was dead and sweep in during the night to capture its soul." I notice the intricate embroidery, yellow and mint green, on a tapestry down the hall and think to myself, "Jesus, Duane, you're such a faggot."
The Oxford English Dictionary lists twenty-six words with fag- as their root, from the late eighteenth century colloquial verb fag -"that which causes weariness, hard work, toil, drudgery, fatigue"-to the 1724 Germanic use of fagotto, a musical term that implies "with bassoon."
At the Pittsburgh International Airport, our flight to London via Newark is cancelled. We are shuttled to a nearby Comfort Inn and eat dinner at a dive bar next door. The place smells familiar and a friend turns to me and says, "It smells like a backwater queer bar in here!" Yes! Exactly. Like the first gay bar 1 went to: Martha's Vineyard on Olive Street in Springfield, Missouri. When I was a heterosexual, I went there one night with co-workers, drank too much, blacked out atop a table, and woke up a homosexual. The next night, I returned newly queer, and met a prince-this is when I believed in fairy tales. What is that smell? Cigarettes, spilled vodka, and lube? Maybe. But this isn't a gay bar.
I walk to the bathroom where, beside the urinal, someone has drawn a cock on the wall. Above this, someone has sprawled the word faggott with two "t"s, which I take to mean, "an overzealous faggot."
In his Annotations, John Keene says, "Missouri, being an amalgam of nearly every American region, presents the poet with a particularly useful...