Just when the frociaggines thought it was safe to back into the Vatican, the Pope has repeated the same homophobic slur which he already apologised for using last month.

Speaking in a private meeting with Italian bishops, Pope Francis there declared there is an air of “frociaggine” (faggotry) in the Vatican and suggested that young gay men should be barred from entering the seminary. There’s no getting around the fact that this was simply plain old homophobia, not an arch bon mot or a catty aside on Drag Race: there’s nothing “slay the house down boots” about workplace discrimination on the basis of a protected characteristic.

The Pope’s initial comments drew widespread criticism, but among my cohort of irony-poisoned gay men in their twenties and thirties, everyone seemed to find it perfectly charming. The word “frociaggine” is just too delightful to inspire serious offence. It sounds like a fabulous cocktail that becomes the drink of the summer or a special variety of pizza you can only find in Abruzzo – it sounds Italian, in other words (can you imagine if he’d said the same thing in German? We’d be fearing for our lives!) It quickly joined the queer lexicon: who among us hasn’t signed into a Zoom meeting at work, rolled their eyes and thought, “there is an air of frociaggine in here”?

In the memes that followed the Pope’s outburst, there was also the sense (largely tongue-in-cheek) that he had earned the right to say it, in the same way we might grant this privilege to Charli XCX. As a man known for his flowing white dresses and dazzling red shoes, his aesthetic is fruity enough that he was deemed queer-adjacent. Some people also argued that his relatively decent record on LGBTQ+ rights should be seen as a mitigating factor (last December, he responded to a question about gay priests with “who am I to judge?”, he has granted priests the right to bless same-sex couples and called for trans people to be welcomed in the church).

While I’m all for having a laugh about frociaggine, I find this argument less convincing – we don’t have to unironically defend the Pope. It’s true that Francis has taken a more conciliatory approach to LGBTQ+ people than his predecessors (an extremely low bar to clear), but that makes his homophobic comments more frustrating, not less. The institution which he heads is still – it should go without saying – no friend to the LGBTQ+ movement.

As Judith Butler argued in her recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the Catholic Church played an instrumental role in disseminating the panic about “gender ideology” which has been taken up by right-wing governments across the world (including our own), and led to clampdowns on trans people and reproductive rights. In light of the church’s history and continuing influence, it’s not great that the Pope still seems to harbour an antipathy towards gay men, even in private.

But I like the fact that we (more or less) collectively decided to find this funny. The right likes to caricature queer people as sour, sanctimonious and perpetually seeking offence, when in reality, there are plenty of things we simply refuse to take seriously. From the popularity of Anita Byrant as a drag character in the 1970s to the timeless joy of bottom-shaming your bestie, there’s a long history of gay people mocking homophobia and reinterpreting it on their own terms. That’s just one of the many things that makes frociaggine so beautiful.