The nickname Brian Thornton’s friends gave him four years ago was as endearing as it was irreverent, as innocent as it was inflammatory. Its root word is harmless enough to be freely bandied about between Thornton and his gay friends, while retaining a viciousness that can bring the 32-year-old to tears.

Thornton’s work at the Lesbian & Gay Community Service Center of Cleveland and his presidency of the group that organizes Cleveland’s gay Pride festival inspired a moniker that captured his incomparable queerness: Faggoty Ass Faggot.

“Amongst my group of friends, we’re pretty free-using of that word [faggot],” said Thornton, whose nickname eventually evolved into his online alter ego at faggotyassfaggot.com.

“For us, it’s a term we don’t find offensive when we use it amongst each other,” Thornton said. “But it’s actually been quite hurtful.”

Hollywood and the news media, along with some gay men and lesbians, are wrangling with the potentially painful edge of one of America’s most popular schoolyard taunts, after a cast member on the television show “Grey’s Anatomy” used the anti-gay slur toward a colleague.

“The incident thrust the word and this anti-gay intolerance into the spotlight,” said Neil Giuliano, president of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. “I think we should try to move society and change the culture so that slurs like this are broadly unacceptable.”

The F-bomb being dropped by a heterosexual inside the workplace disturbed even Thornton, who recalls the piercing feeling he felt when he heard a straight boss refer to workers at a rival company as a bunch of fags.

“I actually cried over it,” Thornton remembered. “It’s really all about context, I guess. I almost never hear it outside the context of my gay friends. [Heterosexuals] haven’t earned the [right to use the word casually], they can never earn it.”

Nexus of slurs

The dance Thornton does around the word faggot is set to a familiar beat, as gay people aren’t the first or only minority group to subvert a slur — or “flip it” — to the point where it’s chic for members of the group to use it, while forbidden for others.

But faggot and the most reviled racist slur in the English language share a legacy of hatred, and appear to be headed toward a similar fate, said Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, author of “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.”

“Each of these words has been used to humiliate people and sometimes terrorize people,” Kennedy said. “When they’re used in that way the people who use them should be ostracized.

“For most people who value their reputation, they’re going to be very careful around these words, and in my view, that is unequivocally a good thing,” said Kennedy, who added that it is a mistake to try to eradicate them entirely.

Not everyone wants to see the words continue to be a part of our country’s vocabulary.

“I think it should be retired,” said gay comedian Jason Stuart, who in seventh grade had someone scratch the word faggot into his locker door.

“It told me to shut up, it taught me not to stand up for myself, it let me know something was wrong with me and I was bad,” said Stuart, who refuses to use the word in his acts or private conversations.

Giuliano agreed. “There may be some who find it acceptable gay-man-to-gay-man, but I would discourage that use,” he said. “We need to be more sensitive to the casual use of what is a very derogatory word.”

While Thornton and Giuliano see similarities between anti-gay and racist slurs, both seem aware of the fine line that exists between comparing oppression, and co-opting it.

“The systematic use of [the n-word] in a large part of our country’s history was to discriminate against black people to a much greater extent and severity than gay people have ever been,” Thornton said.

And although they object to the casual use of the word faggot, several black gay men and lesbians have objected to GLAAD’s enthusiastic pouncing on “Grey’s Anatomy” star Isaiah Washington, who is black, and what they perceive as the inconsistency of many white gay calls for equality.

“Too many white gays and their institutions are silent about these struggles [like racism and classism], except when a specific reference to racial struggles somehow ennobles their own cause,” said khalid kamau, a black gay Atlanta resident. “How could I condemn Isaiah Washington, a black actor, for his actions when TBS re-runs Seinfeld episodes with Michael Richards daily?”

Media dilemma

The media reaction to Washington’s use of an anti-gay slur and Richards unleashing a racist broadside against black patrons of a Los Angeles comedy club were similar in volume and tone, but also revealed the varying gradations of what media institutions deem offensive.

In its reports on the “Grey’s Anatomy” flap, the Associated Press decided to limit its use of the word faggot to direct quotes from Washington, said Kristin Gazlay, deputy managing editor of AP. But when quoting Richards’s outburst in November, the AP printed the slur he used as “n——.”

“[The discrepancy] is one of those instances where I think it’s impossible to get this completely right because it’s so subjective,” said Gazlay, who added that the AP has an informal policy of not printing slurs unless it’s absolutely necessary to the story.

“The mistake we’ve made with the ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ case is continuing using the word after the initial news broke — we should’ve stopped repeating it, and in fact we’re going to do so now,” Gazlay said. “Words have real power, and they have power to wound. It’s not much [making the word] taboo, as it is the word’s very intent is to insult and demean.”

Prominent newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune opted not to print the word faggot at all in their reporting of the “Grey’s Anatomy” incident, instead describing it as an anti-gay or homophobic slur.

“The dilemma newspapers face is if I’m going to write a story about the use of discriminatory language, can I really get the point across if I don’t use the word too?” said Conrad Fink, the Morris chair of newspaper strategy and management at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication.

“You have to handle it very carefully because there is the compelling right and need of minority groups to be treated with dignity and respect,” Fink said. “On the other hand, if we get so knee-jerky sensitive that we have to start eliminating words and stories, we have self-censored to a degree we should not.”

There should be “uniformity and conformity” in a newspaper’s policy toward different slurs, said Fink, who added that “the media, quite frankly, are much more careful than many Americans are in private conversations.”

Prior to the Jan. 29 episode of “Paula Zahn Now” which was dedicated to talking about racist and homophobic slurs, CNN staffers asked guests to use “n-word” and “f-word” instead of saying the actual words on-air, said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, who was a guest on the show.

Referring to faggot as “the f-word,” creates some confusion, though, as “fuck” is more widely known as “the f-word.”

“This is America, you can’t ban words here,” Solmonese said after the show. “We have to get behind what motivates this language, rather than say, ‘If we ban these words, it’ll go away.’”

The self-described politically incorrect Thornton is also reluctant to endorse a complete embargo against words like faggot, but he admits that the “Grey’s Anatomy” controversy has inspired him to look at his use of the word.

Unrelated to the recent debate about the slur, but somewhat fitting, Thornton announced last week that faggotyassfaggot.com was going into exile.

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