It was around 2 a.m. on a Saturday when a hoarse voice from a fast car called me a faggot.

It was 1998, and I was walking home alone after making heart eyes at go-go boys at the Lucky Horseshoe on Halsted Street, Chicago’s main gay strip. The car didn’t slow down. I did, cold with fear but hot from shame for being clocked as not just gay — he got that right — but a fag.

Dazed, I stopped at Taco & Burrito House for tacos that I ate at my apartment as I called the local 24-hour anti-gay violence hotline — a duty, I felt. The kind person on the phone apologized that this happened and thanked me for reporting it.

I don’t always remember what I did yesterday, but I remember this day, the most disquieting of many times “faggot” has cut me. I would bet that any gay man who has been called a faggot, whether spat by a bully or muttered by his own father, remembers when and where it happened, unless they hear it so often they numb to its firepower.

And yet this year at least six theater productions have used “faggot” in their titles, and it doesn’t feel like a coincidence. As I walk past the word emblazoned on posters and imagine straight people stumbling over its fricative F at the box office, I’m unsettled. Why is a slur that a stranger hurled at me now waving hello from my playbill?

In New York, Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot,” a naughty dramedy imagining a grown-up, queer and kinky Prince George, is being staged at Studio Seaview through Dec. 13, its third extension. Earlier this year, you could have seen Kevin Carillo’s “Figaro/Faggots” at Baryshnikov Arts, a fusion of Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Faggots,” Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel of gay sexcess, as well as revivals of Topher Payne’s 2013 play “Angry Fags” at Theater Lab in New York and from Ghostlight Ensemble Theater in Chicago.

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