Male pattern bonding seems bizzare from the outside, so here's the secret to it: you trade insults as a joke to show you'd never...
When I was in college, a friend of mine told me about a game he used to play with the members of his band called “Hey, Asshole”.
The way you play is, when you see one of your band members turned around, you throw an empty water bottle at the back of his head and shout “Hey Asshole!” as loud as you can.
This guy was also, genuinely, one of the nicest, most thoughtful and generous people I have ever met.
That having been said, “What’s up, faggot!” can mean a lot of things. It can, and does, mean what you say, but also
“What’s up, faggot?” can mean, “I think you’re a loser and a liability until you prove me wrong, so start proving me wrong.”
“What’s up, faggot?” can mean, “I’m looking down on you, but I figure I’m so much higher in the pecking order that I can call you names and get away with it and you’ll sit there and take it.”
“What’s up, faggot?” can mean, “You look like a faggot, so me and my buddies are going to kick your ass.”
For a lot of us, it’s actually pretty hard to tell the difference. For all that men get dinged for having less emotional intelligence, you do generally encounter most of those different meanings at one point or another and have to parse them out through subtle social cues.
When the person on one side of the equation and a the person on the other disagree about which meaning is being used you get into trouble.
There was this friend in high school, he was kind of the alpha of our beta pack. And we were high school boys so of course we ragged on each other all the time and we noticed he more than the rest of us was freaked out by gay shit so obviously in the lounge of high school before classes (which ‘70s vets told us used to be the smoking lounge) I’d ambush and glomp and full-mouth kiss him
And then eventually he declared himself bi on the way to declaring himself gay, and we were like “fuck we can’t tease him about getting with boys anymore, that doesn’t work now” so we did the opposite, he’d be like “oh I’m going to spend some time with Seth”, when back when he was posing as into girls he’d been as ribald about intentions as us teenage boys would be, and I’d be like “by which you mean gay buttsex with men” and he’d be like “…yes”
Cause “haha ur gay” and “haha ur insecure about being gay” worked just as well as teases, we were all together doing each other the teenage boy service of constantly probing for vulnerability but then just counting coup instead of doing damage, like “haha that’s a weakness that people can notice and leverage, maybe work on that”