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When I was a child, Smear the Queer was a game all the boys played. Fag was a commonly used slur. When I was in high school the state of California told gay cou

When I was a child, Smear the Queer was a game all the boys played. Fag was a commonly used slur. When I was in high school the state of California told gay couples to go fuck themselves. Societal progress is a wonderful thing to see.

xref 6y ago
It is a great thing to see, California is described as some sort of lefty-socialist-liberal bastion today but like you said it was only 12 years ago they (unconstitutionally) voted in a ban on gay marriage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...
- loeg 6y ago
  California was also considered a lefty-socialist-liberal bastion 12 years ago.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Public opinion on same-sex marriage changed very quickly from 2008 to 2016. Obama opposed same sex marriage in 2008 and didn’t really support it until after the 2012 election. And I'm not sure it's totally accurate to say that what happened was people coming around to "lefty liberalism." The nature of the debate changed quite significantly after 2005. First, it became clear to the public that sexual orientation was an immutable characteristic. When I was growing up in the 1990s, it was still common to hear it called a "lifestyle" implying it was a choice. Second, there was an increased focus on equal legal rights for committed same-sex couples. Appealing to neutral application of universal legal principles is usually a compelling message for even non-lefty Americans. Around the same time as Prop 8 was passed, a state Supreme Court decision legalized same-sex marriage in Iowa. Iowans aren't particularly lefty, but a slim plurality supported the decision within a year or two. Third, in the same timeframe a number of mainline Protestant churches began ordaining gay clergy. While the political influence of these denominations is less than in the past, they’re still a powerful force in the center of the political spectrum among middle age and older Americans. The end result of all that was Obergefell which wasn't particularly lefty or liberal. Justice Kennedy's opinion was a paean to marriage as an ancient and essential social institution. Because marriage was fundamental, participation in it could not be denied to same-sex couples just because of the programming they were born with. Of course, none of this would've happened without decades of tireless "lefty liberal" advocacy. But public opinion changed dramatically within a single decade, and wasn't accompanied a similarly large leftward shift in peoples' politics generally. So it's interesting to think about what drove those changes.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
      It's interesting indeed. In Spain there was a similar fast-paced change: when I was a kid at school in the first half of the 90s, I remember the equivalent of "faggot" being practically the go-to insult for anyone people wanted to bully (and of course any kid deemed to be even mildly effeminate was bullied), and gay people almost always kept it in secret. In the early 2000s, some famous people (TV anchors, etc.) came out of the closet. In 2005, gay marriage was approved, with some controversy but according to polls 65% of the population supported it at the time. 3 or 4 years later, only a minority of extremists remained opposing it, so even the main (and in that time, practically the only) national right-wing party stops actively opposing it. It's curious because I don't think the change was driven by any obvious big movement or campaign with media attention (analogous to, say, BLM, or in the Spanish context, the 15-M movement). Maybe I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the issue, but it seems like most people just kind of spontaneously decided that hating on gay people was stupid. I guess secularization probably helped (2000 was also the year where a fast downward trend started in statistics like religious marriages vs. civil marriages) but it's at most a partial explanation. Most religious people now don't object to gay people getting civil marriages either. PS: This is not to discredit the Spanish gay movements and the people who tirelessly fought for their rights, it's just that my impression is that they weren't on the news that much so most people weren't convinced directly by any specific movement. Plus, gay rights movements in Spain existed at least since the end of the Franco dictatorship but it seems that it wasn't until the early 2000s that there was the sudden change I'm mentioning, it wasn't a slow and constant change.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      I believe the outcome in 2008 was driven more by differential voter turnout than by California residents changing their opinions between 2008 and 2016.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      I think there were two elements. One was that gay marriage suddenly started happening in many places around the world and instead of dire warnings coming true, all the public heard were media reports of some happy couples getting married. The other was generational shift: a generation who had grown up when homosexual relations were unthinkable where even many left-leaning people felt the natural order was being disturbed and Something Must Be Done was supplanted in numbers and political influence by a younger generation where even most conservatives didn't exactly see the gay people they knew as a threat. (And in some parts of the world, the Right even flipped the whole thing on its head and used "their homophobia makes them not like us" as an argument in their campaigns against immigrants or religious minorities). In the middle, lots of people's views on marriage turned out to be a lot less strong than the conservative culture warriors had hoped... I think it goes to show that conservatives can generally rely on younger generations becoming more receptive to their arguments about tax and security and Chesterton's Fence (and less interested in provisions for people on low incomes) as they age to compensate for older conservatives dying off, the switching sides in culture wars tends to trend in the opposite direction.
- eru 6y ago
  > but like you said it was only 12 years ago they (unconstitutionally) voted in a ban on gay marriage Shouldn't that be as follows?: > but like you said it was only 12 years ago they voted in an (unconstitutional) ban on gay marriage Or was the vote itself deemed unconstitutional?
  - LocalH 6y ago
    I know HN generally dislikes discussion about comment voting, but this comment should not have been downvoted. There’s a big difference between a statement saying they “unconstitutionally voted” and one saying they “voted in an unconstitutional measure”
    - eru 6y ago
      Thanks! I've stopped caring about downvotes, especially for anything even vaguely related to politics.
gliese1337 6y ago
> When I was in high school the state of California told gay couples to go fuck themselves. Except, they actually wanted them to do exactly the opposite....
- tombert 6y ago
  Just for the sake of pedantry, I should point out that California was ok with them fucking themselves, just not each other.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    How far back are you going? IIRC the state sodomy law was repealed in the 70s and it certainly wasn't enforced thoroughly
0xcde4c3db 6y ago
For those who aren't familiar, Smear the Queer is a playground game in which one person has to keep a ball away from the rest of the group, who tries to tackle them. It's sort of like a cross between "reverse tag" and gridiron/rugby football. (The gay-bashing element is just a metaphor, you see.)
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  The "queer" in the game's name probably means odd, not homosexual. As in the person holding the ball is the odd one, and everyone should try to hit them. That doesn't stop people from misinterpreting it, since queer mostly means homosexual or some other sexual minority. It's slightly more pessimistic to think that the game is teaching our kids to kill homosexuals vs. some undefined oddness.
  - bhfasdhjgdgsuyv 6y ago
    Lol so when I was getting my ass beat in middle school for sounding a bit effeminate during a game of "smear the queer" it was just because I was "odd". That must be why the called me a faggot too.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      Same. In my experience, this "game" was only "played" targeting femme boys (or in my case, "boys"), and never with their consent. But if we'd hide behind a teacher the mob would be all "oh it's just a game" and more often than not the teacher would try to goad the victim into playing. Fuck that
      - bhfasdhjgdgsuyv 6y ago
        Yup. I learned pretty early on that telling the teacher would only make the beatings worse. For all of those reading that think this is ancient history; I'm 27 and went to school in a city more progressive and accepting than any in America.
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...
hnick 6y ago
I play games with people in their mid-20s and a few have let out "that's gay" as a synonym for something being bad. I don't think any of them would qualify as homophobic, it's just more a case of hearing something so much that it creeps into your lexicon and comes out by mistake sometimes in a moment of distraction or emotion. It took me a while to unlearn it myself because it was extremely common in the 90s at my school (even among guys who later came out as gay, I guess you have to fit in).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bhfasdhjgdgsuyv 6y ago
  They probably aren't explicitly homophobic, but it's disrespectful and a tiny bit homophobic to not adjust your language a tiny bit, because it's obviously negatively impactful to gay people (not everyone, but I know it is to me).
  - hnick 6y ago
    I agree but everyone has moments of emotional weakness where things come out without thinking. It becomes more about breaking a habit so it doesn't happen unconsciously. Or apologising if it does happen. It can take a moment to realise, my original post said "bad/lame" because the use of "lame" was another popular one that took over as supposedly less offensive than "gay", but it too has the capacity to offend those that it would apply to so I thought it best to edit that out.
    - JohnBooty 6y ago
      Keep trying and making progress. There are so many testimonials out there about what a positive difference can be made by avoiding the use of "gay", "lame", etc. as insults.
    - cycomanic 6y ago
      You know what I only realised now from your comment what "lame" in "that's lame" actually means. It tells you how easy it is to create certain associations without someone realising. Mind you I don't use that's lame, not a native speaker and probably also too old for that phrase.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

xref 6y ago

It is a great thing to see, California is described as some sort of lefty-socialist-liberal bastion today but like you said it was only 12 years ago they (unconstitutionally) voted in a ban on gay marriage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...

loeg 6y ago
California was also considered a lefty-socialist-liberal bastion 12 years ago.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Public opinion on same-sex marriage changed very quickly from 2008 to 2016. Obama opposed same sex marriage in 2008 and didn’t really support it until after the 2012 election. And I'm not sure it's totally accurate to say that what happened was people coming around to "lefty liberalism." The nature of the debate changed quite significantly after 2005. First, it became clear to the public that sexual orientation was an immutable characteristic. When I was growing up in the 1990s, it was still common to hear it called a "lifestyle" implying it was a choice. Second, there was an increased focus on equal legal rights for committed same-sex couples. Appealing to neutral application of universal legal principles is usually a compelling message for even non-lefty Americans. Around the same time as Prop 8 was passed, a state Supreme Court decision legalized same-sex marriage in Iowa. Iowans aren't particularly lefty, but a slim plurality supported the decision within a year or two. Third, in the same timeframe a number of mainline Protestant churches began ordaining gay clergy. While the political influence of these denominations is less than in the past, they’re still a powerful force in the center of the political spectrum among middle age and older Americans. The end result of all that was Obergefell which wasn't particularly lefty or liberal. Justice Kennedy's opinion was a paean to marriage as an ancient and essential social institution. Because marriage was fundamental, participation in it could not be denied to same-sex couples just because of the programming they were born with. Of course, none of this would've happened without decades of tireless "lefty liberal" advocacy. But public opinion changed dramatically within a single decade, and wasn't accompanied a similarly large leftward shift in peoples' politics generally. So it's interesting to think about what drove those changes.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
    It's interesting indeed. In Spain there was a similar fast-paced change: when I was a kid at school in the first half of the 90s, I remember the equivalent of "faggot" being practically the go-to insult for anyone people wanted to bully (and of course any kid deemed to be even mildly effeminate was bullied), and gay people almost always kept it in secret. In the early 2000s, some famous people (TV anchors, etc.) came out of the closet. In 2005, gay marriage was approved, with some controversy but according to polls 65% of the population supported it at the time. 3 or 4 years later, only a minority of extremists remained opposing it, so even the main (and in that time, practically the only) national right-wing party stops actively opposing it. It's curious because I don't think the change was driven by any obvious big movement or campaign with media attention (analogous to, say, BLM, or in the Spanish context, the 15-M movement). Maybe I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the issue, but it seems like most people just kind of spontaneously decided that hating on gay people was stupid. I guess secularization probably helped (2000 was also the year where a fast downward trend started in statistics like religious marriages vs. civil marriages) but it's at most a partial explanation. Most religious people now don't object to gay people getting civil marriages either. PS: This is not to discredit the Spanish gay movements and the people who tirelessly fought for their rights, it's just that my impression is that they weren't on the news that much so most people weren't convinced directly by any specific movement. Plus, gay rights movements in Spain existed at least since the end of the Franco dictatorship but it seems that it wasn't until the early 2000s that there was the sudden change I'm mentioning, it wasn't a slow and constant change.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    I believe the outcome in 2008 was driven more by differential voter turnout than by California residents changing their opinions between 2008 and 2016.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    I think there were two elements. One was that gay marriage suddenly started happening in many places around the world and instead of dire warnings coming true, all the public heard were media reports of some happy couples getting married. The other was generational shift: a generation who had grown up when homosexual relations were unthinkable where even many left-leaning people felt the natural order was being disturbed and Something Must Be Done was supplanted in numbers and political influence by a younger generation where even most conservatives didn't exactly see the gay people they knew as a threat. (And in some parts of the world, the Right even flipped the whole thing on its head and used "their homophobia makes them not like us" as an argument in their campaigns against immigrants or religious minorities). In the middle, lots of people's views on marriage turned out to be a lot less strong than the conservative culture warriors had hoped... I think it goes to show that conservatives can generally rely on younger generations becoming more receptive to their arguments about tax and security and Chesterton's Fence (and less interested in provisions for people on low incomes) as they age to compensate for older conservatives dying off, the switching sides in culture wars tends to trend in the opposite direction.
eru 6y ago
> but like you said it was only 12 years ago they (unconstitutionally) voted in a ban on gay marriage Shouldn't that be as follows?: > but like you said it was only 12 years ago they voted in an (unconstitutional) ban on gay marriage Or was the vote itself deemed unconstitutional?
- LocalH 6y ago
  I know HN generally dislikes discussion about comment voting, but this comment should not have been downvoted. There’s a big difference between a statement saying they “unconstitutionally voted” and one saying they “voted in an unconstitutional measure”
  - eru 6y ago
    Thanks! I've stopped caring about downvotes, especially for anything even vaguely related to politics.

gliese1337 6y ago

> When I was in high school the state of California told gay couples to go fuck themselves. Except, they actually wanted them to do exactly the opposite....

tombert 6y ago
Just for the sake of pedantry, I should point out that California was ok with them fucking themselves, just not each other.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  How far back are you going? IIRC the state sodomy law was repealed in the 70s and it certainly wasn't enforced thoroughly

0xcde4c3db 6y ago

For those who aren't familiar, Smear the Queer is a playground game in which one person has to keep a ball away from the rest of the group, who tries to tackle them. It's sort of like a cross between "reverse tag" and gridiron/rugby football. (The gay-bashing element is just a metaphor, you see.)

parsimo2010 6y ago
The "queer" in the game's name probably means odd, not homosexual. As in the person holding the ball is the odd one, and everyone should try to hit them. That doesn't stop people from misinterpreting it, since queer mostly means homosexual or some other sexual minority. It's slightly more pessimistic to think that the game is teaching our kids to kill homosexuals vs. some undefined oddness.
- bhfasdhjgdgsuyv 6y ago
  Lol so when I was getting my ass beat in middle school for sounding a bit effeminate during a game of "smear the queer" it was just because I was "odd". That must be why the called me a faggot too.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Same. In my experience, this "game" was only "played" targeting femme boys (or in my case, "boys"), and never with their consent. But if we'd hide behind a teacher the mob would be all "oh it's just a game" and more often than not the teacher would try to goad the victim into playing. Fuck that
    - bhfasdhjgdgsuyv 6y ago
      Yup. I learned pretty early on that telling the teacher would only make the beatings worse. For all of those reading that think this is ancient history; I'm 27 and went to school in a city more progressive and accepting than any in America.

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...

hnick 6y ago

I play games with people in their mid-20s and a few have let out "that's gay" as a synonym for something being bad. I don't think any of them would qualify as homophobic, it's just more a case of hearing something so much that it creeps into your lexicon and comes out by mistake sometimes in a moment of distraction or emotion. It took me a while to unlearn it myself because it was extremely common in the 90s at my school (even among guys who later came out as gay, I guess you have to fit in).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bhfasdhjgdgsuyv 6y ago
They probably aren't explicitly homophobic, but it's disrespectful and a tiny bit homophobic to not adjust your language a tiny bit, because it's obviously negatively impactful to gay people (not everyone, but I know it is to me).
- hnick 6y ago
  I agree but everyone has moments of emotional weakness where things come out without thinking. It becomes more about breaking a habit so it doesn't happen unconsciously. Or apologising if it does happen. It can take a moment to realise, my original post said "bad/lame" because the use of "lame" was another popular one that took over as supposedly less offensive than "gay", but it too has the capacity to offend those that it would apply to so I thought it best to edit that out.
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    Keep trying and making progress. There are so many testimonials out there about what a positive difference can be made by avoiding the use of "gay", "lame", etc. as insults.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    You know what I only realised now from your comment what "lame" in "that's lame" actually means. It tells you how easy it is to create certain associations without someone realising. Mind you I don't use that's lame, not a native speaker and probably also too old for that phrase.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]