As we finished the last of the wine, Ana pushed herself away from the table and announced she needed a cigarette. She sauntered out of the kitchen and into the front room before calling out to us, “Guys, I think you should come out here.”

Will and I got up from the table and found Ana in the empty barbershop staring at the storefront window. Scrawled in black spray paint on the glass were the letters “F o g,” except inverted backwards, having been written from outside.

Will tilted his head to the side. “Did someone try to write ‘fag’?”

“And what, chickened out?”

“Maybe halfway through and was like, ‘Oh, wait, shit, I’m an asshole.’ ”

Ana looked over at us with concern. “Guys, I’m pretty sure it does say ‘fag.’ ”

“No, it definitely says ‘fog.’ ”

“Maybe he’s a bad speller,” Will offered.

“It’s strange, it feels like we’ve been half-bashed.”

“Or maybe Fog’s his graffiti tag?” Ana said, not sounding particularly convinced.

By that point we were hammered, and trudging outdoors with a bucket of soapy water to scrub spray paint off the window felt completely beyond us. Ana lit her cigarette, Will refilled our glasses, and the three of us sat down on the floor looking up at the three ambiguous letters.

“What about Videofag?” Will said after a moment’s silence.

I looked at him and smiled. It was perfect. Particularly in that moment, after three bottles of wine. The name was a provocation, yes, but also a joyful reclamation of a word that had been turned against us throughout our lives. A word wielded as a weapon; to belittle and demean and shame. But we were going to own it. We were sissy-boy fags and damn proud of it. “Fag” was a catchall, a slur levelled at all queers, and not just queers but the nonconforming, the marginal, the other, the sublime outcast, and these were the people who needed a little space. This little space.

Ana stood up, and with the aid of her hot-pink lipstick, added “” to the window — I was supremely impressed, given the state she was in, that she’d managed to flip her letters. And then, after stepping back to consider her work, she definitively turned the “o” in “F o g” into an “a.” Just so there wasn’t any doubt about the matter.