4 ms·

Not sure how old you are, but even in 2010 when I was in high school our boy scout troop played smear the queer and the first time I learned the word gay was as

by djaque 6y ago

Not sure how old you are, but even in 2010 when I was in high school our boy scout troop played smear the queer and the first time I learned the word gay was as an insult. Didn't really help with the whole growing up gay thing.

onionisafruit 6y ago
I played smear the queer as a kid and had no idea queer meant gay. That was a few decades before you played it though. I think I was in my twenties before I knew queer meant anything other than “unusual”. I even had a couple of gay friends who never let me in on it.
- hnick 6y ago
  I have a similar story, growing up in Australia we had Eeny, meeny, miny, moe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe] and like some other countries we used the n-word instead of tiger. I'm not sure where that came from since I don't think anyone knew what it meant and it definitely wasn't used as an insult by us kids. I don't think I learned what it meant until well into my teens. Pre-internet days, of course.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    We had a a game in Germany which was called "wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann", which means "who is afraid of the black man". I remember that in my mind it was always a chimney sweep, I only realised at some point as an adult that it's actually an incredibly racist name for a game.
    - sdsvsdgggggg 6y ago
      Same here, I think I just thought about thieves being dressed in black to hide themselves in the night.
    - mudita 6y ago
      The "Schwarzer Mann" of the children's game doesn't have anything to do with race. Historically it was a mythical figure used to scare children (Kinderschreck) comparable to the bogey man, visualised as a man with black clothes or a shadow creature not a man with black skin color. There is a theory which connects him to the black death also, which would fit to the game mechanics. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_hat_Angst_vorm_Schwarzen_Mann%3F https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_hat_Angst_vorm_Schwarzen_M...
      - trumbitta2 6y ago
        I read somewhere that The Black Man was a historical figure who actually used to ride through Germany clad in black for "recruiting" children to be raised and trained for war. (Lots of wars going on during the Middle Ages)
    - glaze 6y ago
      It was called like that also in Finland in the 80s/early 90s.
devenblake 6y ago
If it makes you feel any better, I'm a senior enrolled in a Maine high school right now and there's very little homophobia. In fact, a not-insignificant amount of the school is queer. Growing up I only ever heard "gay" used as an insult on-line. Times seem to have changed, and for the better!
- djaque 6y ago
  Yes, I'm amazed at how quickly things have changed. My sister who is only five years younger than me has a friend who is gay and went to the same high school that I did. In only half a decade the culture shifted from just clear and open homophobia (including some teachers) to him being able to be out and open in HS without too much of an issue. The problem isn't really out in the open harassment anymore though. I haven't been in HS for a bit now, but I'm a grad student in a fairly progressive university. Nobody would really think we have homophobes here anymore. But, in reality they exist and just learned how to hide it better. To give an anecdote, I'm quite straight passing and it came up that I had a boyfriend at a bar with some other students while at a conference. For the rest of the week, this one guy in my cohort would make comments to me once everybody else got out of earshot. Stuff like how "sneaky" I am or how he wondered why they let people like me into the conference. I just ignored him and it eventually stopped. Are you gay? Because, if you're not, then you might just not be experiencing the homophobia head on any longer since it isn't so much out in the open.
  - devenblake 6y ago
    My sexuality isn't public but I can say that none of my friends have ever mentioned encounters with implicit homophobia, and that my local school administration (while not being the best) would put an end to that very quickly. However, in Maine it's ground-up: I learned about queer struggles as a kid and I learned about how to protect oneself from any sexually transmissible diseases from a teacher that didn't use gendered pronouns for either party engaging in intercourse. It's very normalized here. If I recall, the University of Maine too runs television advertisements about how accepting it is of queer students. Implicit transphobia is still a thing (it wouldn't be unheard of for someone who's trans here to have an experience similar to yours) but fortunately that's changing too. Note: I should add that this social progress only really applies to the city I'm in and maybe the two other big ones here. There are some rural areas that are sanctuaries (to the point of sounding like legends though they're 100% real) but most of the state geographically speaking is still as far in the past as the deep south in America.

by djaque 6y ago

onionisafruit 6y ago

I played smear the queer as a kid and had no idea queer meant gay. That was a few decades before you played it though. I think I was in my twenties before I knew queer meant anything other than “unusual”. I even had a couple of gay friends who never let me in on it.

hnick 6y ago
I have a similar story, growing up in Australia we had Eeny, meeny, miny, moe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe] and like some other countries we used the n-word instead of tiger. I'm not sure where that came from since I don't think anyone knew what it meant and it definitely wasn't used as an insult by us kids. I don't think I learned what it meant until well into my teens. Pre-internet days, of course.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  We had a a game in Germany which was called "wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann", which means "who is afraid of the black man". I remember that in my mind it was always a chimney sweep, I only realised at some point as an adult that it's actually an incredibly racist name for a game.
  - sdsvsdgggggg 6y ago
    Same here, I think I just thought about thieves being dressed in black to hide themselves in the night.
  - mudita 6y ago
    The "Schwarzer Mann" of the children's game doesn't have anything to do with race. Historically it was a mythical figure used to scare children (Kinderschreck) comparable to the bogey man, visualised as a man with black clothes or a shadow creature not a man with black skin color. There is a theory which connects him to the black death also, which would fit to the game mechanics. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_hat_Angst_vorm_Schwarzen_Mann%3F https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_hat_Angst_vorm_Schwarzen_M...
    - trumbitta2 6y ago
      I read somewhere that The Black Man was a historical figure who actually used to ride through Germany clad in black for "recruiting" children to be raised and trained for war. (Lots of wars going on during the Middle Ages)
  - glaze 6y ago
    It was called like that also in Finland in the 80s/early 90s.

devenblake 6y ago

If it makes you feel any better, I'm a senior enrolled in a Maine high school right now and there's very little homophobia. In fact, a not-insignificant amount of the school is queer. Growing up I only ever heard "gay" used as an insult on-line. Times seem to have changed, and for the better!

djaque 6y ago
Yes, I'm amazed at how quickly things have changed. My sister who is only five years younger than me has a friend who is gay and went to the same high school that I did. In only half a decade the culture shifted from just clear and open homophobia (including some teachers) to him being able to be out and open in HS without too much of an issue. The problem isn't really out in the open harassment anymore though. I haven't been in HS for a bit now, but I'm a grad student in a fairly progressive university. Nobody would really think we have homophobes here anymore. But, in reality they exist and just learned how to hide it better. To give an anecdote, I'm quite straight passing and it came up that I had a boyfriend at a bar with some other students while at a conference. For the rest of the week, this one guy in my cohort would make comments to me once everybody else got out of earshot. Stuff like how "sneaky" I am or how he wondered why they let people like me into the conference. I just ignored him and it eventually stopped. Are you gay? Because, if you're not, then you might just not be experiencing the homophobia head on any longer since it isn't so much out in the open.
- devenblake 6y ago
  My sexuality isn't public but I can say that none of my friends have ever mentioned encounters with implicit homophobia, and that my local school administration (while not being the best) would put an end to that very quickly. However, in Maine it's ground-up: I learned about queer struggles as a kid and I learned about how to protect oneself from any sexually transmissible diseases from a teacher that didn't use gendered pronouns for either party engaging in intercourse. It's very normalized here. If I recall, the University of Maine too runs television advertisements about how accepting it is of queer students. Implicit transphobia is still a thing (it wouldn't be unheard of for someone who's trans here to have an experience similar to yours) but fortunately that's changing too. Note: I should add that this social progress only really applies to the city I'm in and maybe the two other big ones here. There are some rural areas that are sanctuaries (to the point of sounding like legends though they're 100% real) but most of the state geographically speaking is still as far in the past as the deep south in America.