How did "faggot" get to mean "male homosexual"?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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>>>the only problem with it coming from the English Public Schools is that it has never had a homosexual connotation.

I’ll grant it never had a deliberate homosexual connotation. However it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to say that it had potential or unintended homosexual connotations in quite a bit of literature. I could imagine it gaining credence in the US simply by the same route that people now refer to C3PO as a gay robot. It’s the (sterotypically British?) actions of the fag or robot that suggests he ‘s gay that makes it funny to say that they’re gay.

It doesn’t seem that great a leap. I could understand if the word had meant teacher or something, but it essentially means submissive slave boy. In TBSD it is applied to boys routinely who get bent over the table for punishment. That someone of a later age and different culture should see a homosexual connection in the term hardly seems a stretch to me.

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Except that[ul][]the homosexual sense is first attested as “faggot”, and only later became “fag”,[]there is no evidence that “fag” in the public-school sense was ever adopted in the US, andwe know that “faggot” (and “faggoty”) in the “annoying old woman or animal” sense was current in the US. I’ve seen it in old children’s books, myself.[/ul]