This week our score-based performance #ReusableParts/EndlessLove turned ten years old. Besides a host of feelings, this anniversary of sorts reminded me of Maggie Nelson’s quasi-credo that I guess I read in The Argonauts (but maybe Bluets)—“I want to believe that words are enough.” ... That words are enough to transform ourselves, to liberate, to repair, to un-work what labors to contain us, to disorder the pathology of power. I want to believe that words are immodest, that they slay giants. That we can create ourselves in their grammar. ... This past week, a specific, entangled and challenging word re-surfaced when a visibly intoxicated man called me a “faggot” on the street. Since this event, I’ve quizzed myself on my reflexes, happy I stood ground in an askance pose of non-confrontation (you don’t run from wild dogs) but disappointed, even more so surprised, by the first responder in my mind, the voice that quietly replied, “No I am not.” Plunged through time, the drunkard in the outskirts of Paris metamorphosed into the Girls With Big Sprayed Hair who haunted the gymnasium of my Pennsylvania hometown. Grateful Dead t-shirts, hyper color bracelets, chewing gum, caked foundation. I am 12 years-old and no one had ever called me a faggot before them. Their precocious nomination preceded my own self-consciousness by years, so it isn’t hard to understand why my first reaction then was to deny it. “No I am not.” But several decades later, it was incomprehensible to me that my unconscious mind would react in much the same way : Faggot. No I am not. And then briskly sliding in behind this first response as a sort of parenthetical (what gave me away?) ...(continued in comments...)