5 ms·

About 10 years ago I read a bunch of former roller bladers and skateboarders talking about the death of rollerblading in the 1990s. It is much easier to do tr

About 10 years ago I read a bunch of former roller bladers and skateboarders talking about the death of rollerblading in the 1990s. It is much easier to do tricks on rollerblades, also it was viewed as a "gay" activity in a much more homophobic time in society. There was a picture of a rollerblader in a skating mag and they photoshopped pink makeup on his face and made his rollerblades purple. Skaters started calling rollerblades "fruit boots" and that killed it for a lot of people who didn't want to associated with something seen as weak and "gay".

bobbytit 5y ago
Yeah, I think the fruitbooting label killed it more than just that one joke.
watwut 5y ago
Skateboarding has a culture of hating anyone else having fun and liking something that is not "properly difficult". Now they hate scooters for being "too easy". And it is ridiculous every single time.
- pram 5y ago
  Scooter hate also isn’t new, they were popular in the very early 00s
cowmix 5y ago
I had no idea, how stupid. This makes me want to get a pair now.
the_third_wave 5y ago
What happened is that I moved to the Swedish countryside and as such was confronted with hills and unpaved roads. When I lived in the Netherlands I used skates for transport in lieu of a bicycle because they're far easier to take along on public transport. I skated to the station, skated into the train, skated off it after 1.5 hours and 150 km, skated to my job and repeated this on my way home. I was just as fast as if not faster than most cyclists. Every now and then I skated to my parents, an 75km trip which took a while. I never - and I mean never - heard anything about "skating being gay, that might be an American thing? To even consider homophobia (fear of homosexuals?) in this context is completely foreign to me and probably says more about the polarised society in the USA than about anything else. Skates are practical means of transport in flat countries with good infrastructure like the Netherlands. They are not in the part of Sweden where I now live, otherwise I'd still be on them every day. A bicycle works fine here so I reverted to my original means of locomotion.
- mkl 5y ago
  You spent >3 hours a day just commuting? I can't imagine doing that. What did you do on the train?
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    More likely twice a week: at the start of the weekend when going home to parents (and their washing machine), and at the end of it when going back to uni.
    - the_third_wave 5y ago
      Nope, 5 days a week, left home around 07.00, came home around 21.00. I even had a washing machine all of my own together with a house to put it in. I actually had a washing machine as a student as well, it was old but it worked - until a house mate destroyed it, that is.
      - hamburglar 5y ago
        What did you teach that washing machine? :)
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > You spent >3 hours a day just commuting? Sad to say but a lot of people have car commutes in that range. The Bay has tens of thousands of "supercommuters" whose commute is 90mn or above. In Europe train commutes in that range are probably more reasonable: you can sleep in the train (super common for the early HSRs), or it can count as part of your work-day (e.g. handle your mail or whatever, a good train seat often works just as well as an office desk). I've known quite a few people who worked in large cities but wanted to live in the countryside (or at least in smaller cities, way out from even what's usually considered suburbs), they'd take regional or even high-speed train into and out of paris. Not necessarily cheap (especially if you take HSR), but frequent rider and (usually) company contribution made that surprisingly realistic.
  - the_third_wave 5y ago
amelius 5y ago
> also it was viewed as a "gay" activity in a much more homophobic time in society. There's hockey on rollerblades, I'm sure there's nothing "gay" about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_hockey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_hockey
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  There is, I'm sure plenty of roller hockey players are gay. That said, though roller hockey uses rollerblades, I would view it as a separate hobby from roller blading.
brandall10 5y ago
I was a skater from '85-'89 in the San Fernando Valley. I remember there being a narrow lane of what was cool... most activities that weren't skateboarding weren't, because it was a lifestyle, and if you weren't fully dedicated to it and had a good sense of what was currently accepted in the brands/decks, clothing, how you setup your board, etc, you could quickly be labeled a poseur. And this was a moving target. If you skated a Hawk board in '85 it was okay... but by '87, you should have been riding Santa Monica Airlines, and legacy brands were not cool. By '89 it was H-Street and having an SMA deck could be a questionable choice. Some of my friends and I bought some rollerblades as they hit the scene but didn't really get into it in any meaningful way, just riding in our neighborhood and at the local skating rink. We wouldn't be caught riding them out in the wider public lest we could be seen and ridiculed by one of the other skater gangs in the area.
- neilv 5y ago
  That sounds like, instead of those skaters being free individualists or rebels, they were excessively controlled commercial consumers. If so, how did that happen, in that case?
  - analog31 5y ago
    I suspect that it has to do with any trend that gets too big, and the only antidote is to make the rules into a moving target. This happened with punk rock when I was into that. At some point, the punk bands rebelled against punk fashion, and started showing up in worn but otherwise regular looking street clothes.
  - klipt 5y ago
    That sounds like a riddle. Do the trendsetters control fashion, or does fashion control the trendsetters? It's probably a complex dynamical interaction. The fact that the favored brands kept changing though, suggests to me that the corporations weren't exactly in control (otherwise the first winning brand would have presumably preferred to permanently monopolize the market).
    - 5y ago
NicoJuicy 5y ago
I bladed A LOT when I was younger, still take it out sometimes. And your argument is new to me ( Belgium), I've never witnessed any harassment.
ThrowMeXY 5y ago
It's definitely an American thing. It did not stop me from roller blading here in Europe, but it's always in the back of my head. Proof: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/tvshowbiz/video-1217603/The-Simpsons-creators-hint-Waylon-Smithers-sexuality.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/tvshowbiz/video-1217603/Th...
WalterBright 5y ago
When I was young, skateboarding was considered something only kids did, something you grew out of. Of course, the boards in those days were pretty primitive, just roller skate wheels on fixed axles.
grawprog 5y ago
Yeah, that's pretty much how it was. I remember not wanting to rollerblade much after my friends started getting into skateboarding for that reason. That and they were inconvenient because you had to carry your shoes around with you or the rollerblades once you changed to your shoes. It was easier, and cooler looking, to carry a skateboard. I do remember enjoying them though. They were fun to rip around on. I did grow out of skateboarding though, then that longboarding craze came out and I never really got into it. Funny enough, these days, I'd probably be more willing to go rollerblading somewhere than skateboarding if I had the chance.
fao_ 5y ago
> Skaters started calling rollerblades "fruit boots" and that killed it for a lot of people who didn't want to associated with something seen as weak and "gay". Their problem, a lot of fellow queer people rollerblade and they have a hell of a time. It's actually extremely funny how homophobes will stop having fun specifically because something gets coded as queer. Like they're deliberately cutting off their nose to spite their face.
- toxik 5y ago
  I think people who don’t want to be called gay are homophobes. It seems like you implied that though. It’s very normal to not want to do things that make you unpopular.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Do you mean "I don't think"? The rest of your comment makes it seem like you do.
  - Buttons840 5y ago
    Or maybe they just don't want people to be mean to them. If someone kindly tells me I do something that seems gay, but is otherwise kind to me, I probably wouldn't care. If someone is calling me gay to be mean, there's probably other mean things they're doing too, and I won't like it.
  - fao_ 5y ago
    > I think people who don’t want to be called gay are homophobes. It seems like you implied that though. If someone stops doing a hobby just because they are being called gay, that is homophobic, yes. Someone who is not homophobic wouldn't give a shit, and wouldn't view being called gay as implicitly bad. If people started insulting them in a non-homophobic way, it is unlikely that that would be viewed as a reason to stop the hobby by many people. In fact, in 'nerd culture' the insults are viewed as a badge of honour of sorts -- these people do not stop programming, electrical engineering, and hyperfocusing on Star Wars just because they are being insulted. This largely only happens with hobbies that are considered gay or otherwise 'feminine', because being called one of those are viewed as worse than just being insulted, and the reason for that is implicit homophobia. There's a good tangential argument here as to the social and cultural forces that led to 'blading' being dropped en masse: https://toldandretold1.medium.com/the-great-blading-bubble-how-toxic-masculinity-inflated-and-burst-aggressive-inline-4313e4930714 https://toldandretold1.medium.com/the-great-blading-bubble-h...
odessacubbage 5y ago
inliners got a reputation for waxing the absolute shit out of spots which is considered a somewhat major party foul, especially in the more cloistered, local centric skate scenes of the 90s and early 2000s. bmxers were disliked for similar reasons; pegs absolutely destroy ledges. there is also the perpetual problem of access to a limited resource, i've observed my dad going through similar flame wars concerning motorized and non motorized access to backcountry trails, albeit he called hikers the trail gestapo rather than fags. i imagine similar cultural clashes can be observed around lake and beachside hobbies and the tensions between skiiers and snowboarders, bolt vs trad climbers, etc are well documented. skateboarding has always been run by and for 16 year old boys, which is the way it should be, and they labeled these things with the vernacular they knew. if it's any consolation, that kid with the shaved head & blind jeans who called you a fruitbooter in 1995 probably called his dad, his biology teacher and anyone else within earshot names that were several magnitudes worse. also in a final twist of irony, skateboarding's transition into an olympic sport with leagues and rules has put it under the control of world skate, a rollerblading organization. >https://skateboarding.transworld.net/news/from-bad-to-worse-for-world-skate/ https://skateboarding.transworld.net/news/from-bad-to-worse-...
- pram 5y ago
  That reminds me, absolutely everything had loads of wax when those Soap grinding shoes were popular too lol
alisonkisk 5y ago
They called it gay because thet didn't like it, not vice versa. Roller blades are cringy and awkward by nature, because they are stuck on your feet and you can't get off them as needed, unlike a skateboard or bike, and they awkward to balance on when you aren't zooming, unlike rollerskates.
mdip 5y ago
I'm surprised I've never heard of this, but looking back,... it fits. Back in the late 90s, myself and a few friends popped on our first pair of inlines[0]. I think years of attending "skating parties" as school events designed to give parents a day out and kids an opportunity to be a problem made switching from quads to inlines very easy. We discovered we could much more easily pull of various tricks on inlines that were more challenging in quads due to the range of ankle motion that inlines allow. My friends and I became a bit obsessed. At one point, I dropped $240 for a set of high-end indoor ABEC-9 bearings. I owned several sets of wheels with different hardness/size and some nice wrist guards and knee/elbow pads, the latter used only when trying to learn tricks that were obviously challenging -- the rule is that it is far more cool to do something dangerous in a manner that maximizes injury if you fail, I guess (no helmets -- that was way uncool!). Kind of amazed I didn't end up with a closed-head injury as a kid with that thinking... I did land a concussion at one point. I can say somewhat reliably that, at least where I'm from, I don't recall anyone ever indicating that the reason they don't skate is because "it's gay![2]", or specifically pointing out that "I must be gay because I use inlines" -- not that having the "SO GAY" thrown around at me was all that unusual. I don't think you could have guy friends in HS in the 90s without a constant barrage of "you're gay" accusations. I think the hurling of "gay" had a lot to do with: It takes a reasonable amount of skill to learn -- and there are a reasonable number of people who will give up. As popularity increases, the number of people who get frustrated increases. Not wanting to be left out of a trend, they employ shame/reverse-fanboi-ism to knock those who have mastered it/enjoy it down a peg and encourage them to do activities that the shamer can participate in. There was a bit of "parent's make it uncool" to it, too. My 50 year old dad took up inline skating for a year. But I think it's more than just "when old people start doing it, it's uncool". This happened in my HS in the 90s with skiing. Where I live, ski/snowboard clubs in HS are common (despite having very little worth skiing on other than an abundance of snow). I watched during High School as skiing became "uncool" (in my HS, I'm sure it was "gay!") -- far more than half of those in ski club were snowboarding. Snowboarding was a much less expensive way to get on the slopes. Parents pushed their kids that way when discovering that purchasing a pair of usable (new[3]) skis, boots, poles and bindings was twice as much as the proliferation of lower-end boards that we started seeing early on. And the nerdier kids tended to have wealthier parents and tended to buy skis. It's, arguably, more difficult to learn to ski, as well[4]. It happened with hover boards, though for different reasons... almost the opposite. They used to be very expensive, but then a mess of them were dumped in the US. Enough of them caught fire to give the whole category a bad name and many had a design aesthetic that would universally appeal to a 12-year-old girl, but nearly nobody else. You'd think it would be possible to ride a device like this and not look like a person with too much disposable income and is so lazy that they'll risk explosion over walking but I haven't seen anyone on a segway-like-hoverboard (Ginger!) that didn't result in me thinking that, myself. This would have been a device pretty much made for a guy like me -- I was initially excited when the prices were reaching $300, but by then the bottom fell out and I had no interest in ever owning one. I own/love my OneWheel (Pint), which seems like a hoverboard/e-scooter/skatebaord but is in a category on its own. I'm wondering if these will (or haven't already) landed in the category of "uncool". I believe there's potential for it, but there's a few things that are unique about these that I can't say confidently I have any idea what the future holds. They're expensive. They're really strange to learn to ride -- everyone I have taught has said the same thing "10-15 minutes of feeling like you will never be able to learn this thing, followed by an almost immediate jump to confident riding" (shortly thereafter, confidence exceeds actual ability, you nose-dive, and don't ride it for a little while/have a quick trip to the ER). The only differences with this product and others that were fad-worthy is that the age of riders is extremely variable. I've met a lot of riders in my area -- many are older than 40, most above 30, one is 70[5]. I rarely see someone riding one (regardless of age) without a helmet. I think it has one major inoculation to the incoming "LAME!" label. People make the mistake of thinking this thing is "self-balancing", easy to ride/master and safe. I'd be tempted to respond to the challenge by offering my board up with a simple "It's self-balancing -- wanna give it a try before knocking it?" and then posting the results to YouTube. That's a challenge that doesn't work with inlines. FWIW: if my kids are any indication, "That's so gay" is the thing that's being shamed. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of homophobia among the older boys in HS, but I felt pretty good when my son's friend called a video game "gay" and my son turned right around and said "it's the GAYEST!" rolling his eyes, shutting down his friend -- my oldest is 6'2" and is popular with the girls at his school. While you may never really know at this age, I don't believe he's ever questioned his sexuality. And he's a really good kid -- certainly not innocent of these kinds of things, himself, but very clever and has a good heart -- it made me a little proud watching him shame his friend trying to shame him using a slur. [0] I'm being pedantic but Rollerblade brand skates were pretty shoddy, even staying way away from the skate-shop high-end inlines -- there were very few that had aluminum frames, all used the lowest end ABEC-5/7 bearings (nobody puts good bearings in, even today) and K2 made a much more comfortable boot. [1] "Girls only like guys who have great skills!" - Napoleon Dynamite [2] The author's observations of the late 90s, at least where I lived, is accurate -- "gay" was the chosen slur for anything that was "extremely uncool". [3] The smart ones scoured Salvation Army stores (no Craigslist), purchased a banged up set that still beat the rentals, and took it to a ski shop to get sharpened/serviced. My mom was smart ... I had $30 skis that were amazing. [4] This was not my personal experience, but I jumped to skiing for a reason -- I learned very quickly to ditch the poles. I was very confident on inlines by this point and an adjustment in thinking made me realize that inline skating and skiing involve the same balancing skills/muscles. I had not been into skateboards, and had learned to balance while moving sideways. [5] And he's a bit of a terror on it -- I have broken ribs and taken some falls that, at 70, would have stood a chance of killing me.

bobbytit 5y ago

Yeah, I think the fruitbooting label killed it more than just that one joke.

watwut 5y ago

Skateboarding has a culture of hating anyone else having fun and liking something that is not "properly difficult". Now they hate scooters for being "too easy". And it is ridiculous every single time.

pram 5y ago
Scooter hate also isn’t new, they were popular in the very early 00s

cowmix 5y ago

I had no idea, how stupid. This makes me want to get a pair now.

the_third_wave 5y ago

What happened is that I moved to the Swedish countryside and as such was confronted with hills and unpaved roads. When I lived in the Netherlands I used skates for transport in lieu of a bicycle because they're far easier to take along on public transport. I skated to the station, skated into the train, skated off it after 1.5 hours and 150 km, skated to my job and repeated this on my way home. I was just as fast as if not faster than most cyclists. Every now and then I skated to my parents, an 75km trip which took a while. I never - and I mean never - heard anything about "skating being gay, that might be an American thing? To even consider homophobia (fear of homosexuals?) in this context is completely foreign to me and probably says more about the polarised society in the USA than about anything else. Skates are practical means of transport in flat countries with good infrastructure like the Netherlands. They are not in the part of Sweden where I now live, otherwise I'd still be on them every day. A bicycle works fine here so I reverted to my original means of locomotion.

mkl 5y ago
You spent >3 hours a day just commuting? I can't imagine doing that. What did you do on the train?
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  More likely twice a week: at the start of the weekend when going home to parents (and their washing machine), and at the end of it when going back to uni.
  - the_third_wave 5y ago
    Nope, 5 days a week, left home around 07.00, came home around 21.00. I even had a washing machine all of my own together with a house to put it in. I actually had a washing machine as a student as well, it was old but it worked - until a house mate destroyed it, that is.
    - hamburglar 5y ago
      What did you teach that washing machine? :)
- masklinn 5y ago
  > You spent >3 hours a day just commuting? Sad to say but a lot of people have car commutes in that range. The Bay has tens of thousands of "supercommuters" whose commute is 90mn or above. In Europe train commutes in that range are probably more reasonable: you can sleep in the train (super common for the early HSRs), or it can count as part of your work-day (e.g. handle your mail or whatever, a good train seat often works just as well as an office desk). I've known quite a few people who worked in large cities but wanted to live in the countryside (or at least in smaller cities, way out from even what's usually considered suburbs), they'd take regional or even high-speed train into and out of paris. Not necessarily cheap (especially if you take HSR), but frequent rider and (usually) company contribution made that surprisingly realistic.
- the_third_wave 5y ago

amelius 5y ago

> also it was viewed as a "gay" activity in a much more homophobic time in society. There's hockey on rollerblades, I'm sure there's nothing "gay" about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_hockey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_hockey

boomboomsubban 5y ago
There is, I'm sure plenty of roller hockey players are gay. That said, though roller hockey uses rollerblades, I would view it as a separate hobby from roller blading.

brandall10 5y ago

I was a skater from '85-'89 in the San Fernando Valley. I remember there being a narrow lane of what was cool... most activities that weren't skateboarding weren't, because it was a lifestyle, and if you weren't fully dedicated to it and had a good sense of what was currently accepted in the brands/decks, clothing, how you setup your board, etc, you could quickly be labeled a poseur. And this was a moving target. If you skated a Hawk board in '85 it was okay... but by '87, you should have been riding Santa Monica Airlines, and legacy brands were not cool. By '89 it was H-Street and having an SMA deck could be a questionable choice. Some of my friends and I bought some rollerblades as they hit the scene but didn't really get into it in any meaningful way, just riding in our neighborhood and at the local skating rink. We wouldn't be caught riding them out in the wider public lest we could be seen and ridiculed by one of the other skater gangs in the area.

neilv 5y ago
That sounds like, instead of those skaters being free individualists or rebels, they were excessively controlled commercial consumers. If so, how did that happen, in that case?
- analog31 5y ago
  I suspect that it has to do with any trend that gets too big, and the only antidote is to make the rules into a moving target. This happened with punk rock when I was into that. At some point, the punk bands rebelled against punk fashion, and started showing up in worn but otherwise regular looking street clothes.
- klipt 5y ago
  That sounds like a riddle. Do the trendsetters control fashion, or does fashion control the trendsetters? It's probably a complex dynamical interaction. The fact that the favored brands kept changing though, suggests to me that the corporations weren't exactly in control (otherwise the first winning brand would have presumably preferred to permanently monopolize the market).
  - 5y ago

NicoJuicy 5y ago

I bladed A LOT when I was younger, still take it out sometimes. And your argument is new to me ( Belgium), I've never witnessed any harassment.

ThrowMeXY 5y ago

It's definitely an American thing. It did not stop me from roller blading here in Europe, but it's always in the back of my head. Proof: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/tvshowbiz/video-1217603/The-Simpsons-creators-hint-Waylon-Smithers-sexuality.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/tvshowbiz/video-1217603/Th...

WalterBright 5y ago

When I was young, skateboarding was considered something only kids did, something you grew out of. Of course, the boards in those days were pretty primitive, just roller skate wheels on fixed axles.

grawprog 5y ago

Yeah, that's pretty much how it was. I remember not wanting to rollerblade much after my friends started getting into skateboarding for that reason. That and they were inconvenient because you had to carry your shoes around with you or the rollerblades once you changed to your shoes. It was easier, and cooler looking, to carry a skateboard. I do remember enjoying them though. They were fun to rip around on. I did grow out of skateboarding though, then that longboarding craze came out and I never really got into it. Funny enough, these days, I'd probably be more willing to go rollerblading somewhere than skateboarding if I had the chance.

fao_ 5y ago

> Skaters started calling rollerblades "fruit boots" and that killed it for a lot of people who didn't want to associated with something seen as weak and "gay". Their problem, a lot of fellow queer people rollerblade and they have a hell of a time. It's actually extremely funny how homophobes will stop having fun specifically because something gets coded as queer. Like they're deliberately cutting off their nose to spite their face.

toxik 5y ago
I think people who don’t want to be called gay are homophobes. It seems like you implied that though. It’s very normal to not want to do things that make you unpopular.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Do you mean "I don't think"? The rest of your comment makes it seem like you do.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Or maybe they just don't want people to be mean to them. If someone kindly tells me I do something that seems gay, but is otherwise kind to me, I probably wouldn't care. If someone is calling me gay to be mean, there's probably other mean things they're doing too, and I won't like it.
- fao_ 5y ago
  > I think people who don’t want to be called gay are homophobes. It seems like you implied that though. If someone stops doing a hobby just because they are being called gay, that is homophobic, yes. Someone who is not homophobic wouldn't give a shit, and wouldn't view being called gay as implicitly bad. If people started insulting them in a non-homophobic way, it is unlikely that that would be viewed as a reason to stop the hobby by many people. In fact, in 'nerd culture' the insults are viewed as a badge of honour of sorts -- these people do not stop programming, electrical engineering, and hyperfocusing on Star Wars just because they are being insulted. This largely only happens with hobbies that are considered gay or otherwise 'feminine', because being called one of those are viewed as worse than just being insulted, and the reason for that is implicit homophobia. There's a good tangential argument here as to the social and cultural forces that led to 'blading' being dropped en masse: https://toldandretold1.medium.com/the-great-blading-bubble-how-toxic-masculinity-inflated-and-burst-aggressive-inline-4313e4930714 https://toldandretold1.medium.com/the-great-blading-bubble-h...

odessacubbage 5y ago

inliners got a reputation for waxing the absolute shit out of spots which is considered a somewhat major party foul, especially in the more cloistered, local centric skate scenes of the 90s and early 2000s. bmxers were disliked for similar reasons; pegs absolutely destroy ledges. there is also the perpetual problem of access to a limited resource, i've observed my dad going through similar flame wars concerning motorized and non motorized access to backcountry trails, albeit he called hikers the trail gestapo rather than fags. i imagine similar cultural clashes can be observed around lake and beachside hobbies and the tensions between skiiers and snowboarders, bolt vs trad climbers, etc are well documented. skateboarding has always been run by and for 16 year old boys, which is the way it should be, and they labeled these things with the vernacular they knew. if it's any consolation, that kid with the shaved head & blind jeans who called you a fruitbooter in 1995 probably called his dad, his biology teacher and anyone else within earshot names that were several magnitudes worse. also in a final twist of irony, skateboarding's transition into an olympic sport with leagues and rules has put it under the control of world skate, a rollerblading organization. >https://skateboarding.transworld.net/news/from-bad-to-worse-for-world-skate/ https://skateboarding.transworld.net/news/from-bad-to-worse-...

pram 5y ago
That reminds me, absolutely everything had loads of wax when those Soap grinding shoes were popular too lol

alisonkisk 5y ago

They called it gay because thet didn't like it, not vice versa. Roller blades are cringy and awkward by nature, because they are stuck on your feet and you can't get off them as needed, unlike a skateboard or bike, and they awkward to balance on when you aren't zooming, unlike rollerskates.

mdip 5y ago

I'm surprised I've never heard of this, but looking back,... it fits. Back in the late 90s, myself and a few friends popped on our first pair of inlines[0]. I think years of attending "skating parties" as school events designed to give parents a day out and kids an opportunity to be a problem made switching from quads to inlines very easy. We discovered we could much more easily pull of various tricks on inlines that were more challenging in quads due to the range of ankle motion that inlines allow. My friends and I became a bit obsessed. At one point, I dropped $240 for a set of high-end indoor ABEC-9 bearings. I owned several sets of wheels with different hardness/size and some nice wrist guards and knee/elbow pads, the latter used only when trying to learn tricks that were obviously challenging -- the rule is that it is far more cool to do something dangerous in a manner that maximizes injury if you fail, I guess (no helmets -- that was way uncool!). Kind of amazed I didn't end up with a closed-head injury as a kid with that thinking... I did land a concussion at one point. I can say somewhat reliably that, at least where I'm from, I don't recall anyone ever indicating that the reason they don't skate is because "it's gay![2]", or specifically pointing out that "I must be gay because I use inlines" -- not that having the "SO GAY" thrown around at me was all that unusual. I don't think you could have guy friends in HS in the 90s without a constant barrage of "you're gay" accusations. I think the hurling of "gay" had a lot to do with: It takes a reasonable amount of skill to learn -- and there are a reasonable number of people who will give up. As popularity increases, the number of people who get frustrated increases. Not wanting to be left out of a trend, they employ shame/reverse-fanboi-ism to knock those who have mastered it/enjoy it down a peg and encourage them to do activities that the shamer can participate in. There was a bit of "parent's make it uncool" to it, too. My 50 year old dad took up inline skating for a year. But I think it's more than just "when old people start doing it, it's uncool". This happened in my HS in the 90s with skiing. Where I live, ski/snowboard clubs in HS are common (despite having very little worth skiing on other than an abundance of snow). I watched during High School as skiing became "uncool" (in my HS, I'm sure it was "gay!") -- far more than half of those in ski club were snowboarding. Snowboarding was a much less expensive way to get on the slopes. Parents pushed their kids that way when discovering that purchasing a pair of usable (new[3]) skis, boots, poles and bindings was twice as much as the proliferation of lower-end boards that we started seeing early on. And the nerdier kids tended to have wealthier parents and tended to buy skis. It's, arguably, more difficult to learn to ski, as well[4]. It happened with hover boards, though for different reasons... almost the opposite. They used to be very expensive, but then a mess of them were dumped in the US. Enough of them caught fire to give the whole category a bad name and many had a design aesthetic that would universally appeal to a 12-year-old girl, but nearly nobody else. You'd think it would be possible to ride a device like this and not look like a person with too much disposable income and is so lazy that they'll risk explosion over walking but I haven't seen anyone on a segway-like-hoverboard (Ginger!) that didn't result in me thinking that, myself. This would have been a device pretty much made for a guy like me -- I was initially excited when the prices were reaching $300, but by then the bottom fell out and I had no interest in ever owning one. I own/love my OneWheel (Pint), which seems like a hoverboard/e-scooter/skatebaord but is in a category on its own. I'm wondering if these will (or haven't already) landed in the category of "uncool". I believe there's potential for it, but there's a few things that are unique about these that I can't say confidently I have any idea what the future holds. They're expensive. They're really strange to learn to ride -- everyone I have taught has said the same thing "10-15 minutes of feeling like you will never be able to learn this thing, followed by an almost immediate jump to confident riding" (shortly thereafter, confidence exceeds actual ability, you nose-dive, and don't ride it for a little while/have a quick trip to the ER). The only differences with this product and others that were fad-worthy is that the age of riders is extremely variable. I've met a lot of riders in my area -- many are older than 40, most above 30, one is 70[5]. I rarely see someone riding one (regardless of age) without a helmet. I think it has one major inoculation to the incoming "LAME!" label. People make the mistake of thinking this thing is "self-balancing", easy to ride/master and safe. I'd be tempted to respond to the challenge by offering my board up with a simple "It's self-balancing -- wanna give it a try before knocking it?" and then posting the results to YouTube. That's a challenge that doesn't work with inlines. FWIW: if my kids are any indication, "That's so gay" is the thing that's being shamed. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of homophobia among the older boys in HS, but I felt pretty good when my son's friend called a video game "gay" and my son turned right around and said "it's the GAYEST!" rolling his eyes, shutting down his friend -- my oldest is 6'2" and is popular with the girls at his school. While you may never really know at this age, I don't believe he's ever questioned his sexuality. And he's a really good kid -- certainly not innocent of these kinds of things, himself, but very clever and has a good heart -- it made me a little proud watching him shame his friend trying to shame him using a slur. [0] I'm being pedantic but Rollerblade brand skates were pretty shoddy, even staying way away from the skate-shop high-end inlines -- there were very few that had aluminum frames, all used the lowest end ABEC-5/7 bearings (nobody puts good bearings in, even today) and K2 made a much more comfortable boot. [1] "Girls only like guys who have great skills!" - Napoleon Dynamite [2] The author's observations of the late 90s, at least where I lived, is accurate -- "gay" was the chosen slur for anything that was "extremely uncool". [3] The smart ones scoured Salvation Army stores (no Craigslist), purchased a banged up set that still beat the rentals, and took it to a ski shop to get sharpened/serviced. My mom was smart ... I had $30 skis that were amazing. [4] This was not my personal experience, but I jumped to skiing for a reason -- I learned very quickly to ditch the poles. I was very confident on inlines by this point and an adjustment in thinking made me realize that inline skating and skiing involve the same balancing skills/muscles. I had not been into skateboards, and had learned to balance while moving sideways. [5] And he's a bit of a terror on it -- I have broken ribs and taken some falls that, at 70, would have stood a chance of killing me.