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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 couples to go fuck themselves. Societal progress is a wonderful thing to see.

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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.

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.

I have a similar story, growing up in Australia we had 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.

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.

Same here, I think I just thought about thieves being dressed in black to hide themselves in the night.

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_M...

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)

It was called like that also in Finland in the 80s/early 90s.

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!

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.

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.

It was explicit for me as late as 2004! I am still rather shocked at the progress. I’ve also noticed a huge distinction between lgbt people of different generations, gen y is practically prudish comparatively. “Sex positive” is far less of a thing it seems.

I find it interesting that you mention this offhand because I've been very seriously noticing this type of prudishness in a lot of gen z and younger gen y people and its begining to manifest as old style homophobia

Gen Z is weird. Most young people are very accepting of LGBT peoples but stuff is starting to turn around back to homophobia now that transphobia is Hip And Cool again (thanks J.K. Rowling[0]), because many feminists are invalidating transgender women in the name of equal rights. Transphobia breeds homophobia. I worry sometimes what will happen if young people too become trans-exclusionary feminists but thankfully it's unlikely such a thing could occur. Young people are more open-minded now and discovering they're transgender themselves.

I should add that I'm not quite sure exactly how the trend of homophobia that you speak of is hitting younger people. I haven't noticed a shift backwards in real life or on-line. If you're referring to social media homophobia you should realize that "zoomer humor" is radically different from typical humor and many kids will sound like a deranged homophobes/racists/sexists until you realize that they themselves are gay/black/female and are making jokes at their own expense. That being said, ask before assuming they are or aren't joking.

[0] - I'm not sure about the legitimacy of Slate as a publication but a brief skim of this article makes me think it hits on everything relevant in the controversy (if you don't already know about it; it's semi-common knowledge nowadays): https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/06/jk-rowling-trans-me...

"a not-insignificant amount of the school is queer"

In what way - many queer students?

I'd say probably half of the people I associate with are in some way queer, and probably more than 10% of the student population. I'd just say the amount is significant outright but there's no way to really know for sure if my numbers are correct because nobody's polling for that.

Interesting - how does that come about? Do such students flock to that school?

The experience seems to be the same for us in northern Italy. When I was in high school, about 12 years ago, there was some homophobia and, even if I knew my friends would have supported me, I hesitated to come out for a long time, simply because I didn't know how to move, and it seemed a big thing. There were maybe one or two openly gay students and they were supported by some, insulted by others. A younger friend of mine, just 10 years later, was completely out and had a good high school experience as an out student.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

Yep and not just gay. The nerds, fat, awkward, people who spoke with a lisp. Basically a way to identify anyone not in the “in group” and punish them.

If you were getting beat up for the way you sound, that was regular homophobia, not the game. In smear the queer, you only get chased and tackled if you have the ball; if you get tackled you throw the ball away and someone else gets it and everyone chases the new person. What you described does not sound like a game of smear the queer.

So when the other kids got chased and everyone called them faggots and queers it wasn't the game either? Or it was the game and 'faggot' isn't homophobic?

No, the game itself it homophobic, and everyone who played it knew or was learning exactly what everyone meant by queer, and it certainly wasn't 'odd'.

Kids games have a lot of regional differences. I don't deny the existence of the game you describe, but I and others were beaten up by crowds of bullies yelling "smear the queer" with no ball to be seen.

In my experience the game was played by someone punting the ball in the air and the person chose to become the target by grabbing the ball. We used to rush to grab the ball, it was a way to prove your toughness, by how long you could last as the target.

I do not discount your experiences at all, homophobia was still prevalent in my elementary and middle school and I also graduated in a liberal state in 2008.

Oh for sure, but at the same time queer in the context of the game didn't mean a generic 'odd', divorced from homophobia. At least by middle school, the kids knew that it meant gay and that gay was bad. Hell, we snickered at the world gay singing Christmas carols in 3rd grade. Using it as an excuse to beat my queer ass was a consequence of that, but I'm sure they would have invented another if the game didn't exist.

I don't think it much matters how the term originated based on my memories as a child—it was certainly internalized as homophobia and caused me a lot of pain growing up.

Here is a citation in 1981 describing the game and absolutely not related to the term "odd".

https://archive.org/details/BAR_19810115?q=%22Smear+the+Quee...

> Casually strolls up to a group and throws the designated victim to the ground and screams fag and runs away.

That's not the game were talking about.

That is, obviously, a homophobic “game”; I suspect it is newer than the ball game of the same name, and probably the result of homophobes applying the name of the ballgame.

That article claims the homophobic, ball-free game was new in 1981, the ball game seems to be well established in 1969: https://www.postandcourier.com/free-times/archives/smear-the....

I don't see any reason to believe that “queer” in the ballgame has any connection to homosexuality.

Queer was used to denote (pejoratively) a gay person starting in the late 19th century, and increasingly was used that way into the fifties and sixties. The term was later reclaimed by the queer community in the 80s, 90s, and aughts.

The term, particularly in the mood century, was absolutely used to describe gay people.

I didn't say that I doubted that the use of the term to refer to gay people was current when the ball game was created. I said that I doubted that that’s the sense that was referenced in the name of the ball game.

The pejorative use to refer to gay people wasn't the dominant use of the term until, well, quite late in the 20th Century, and the structure of the game makes it a whole lot less likely that the reference was a pejorative reference to a sexual minority rather than simply the odd man out.

It's kind of like if you someone argued that the “ball” in the name of association football was a reference to testicles and not the main piece of equipment in the game. Sure, the word also was used that way at the time, but it doesn't make as much sense in context as the alternative, and without some evidence beyond the mere existence of the sense of the word it's not a particularly compelling explanation.

> It's slightly more pessimistic to think that the game is teaching our kids to kill homosexuals vs. some undefined oddness.

not by much, because even taken literally creating a game around the fact of beating up the odd member of a group isn't exactly what I'd consider a great pedagogical concept

What does "probably" mean here? Does it mean "Here is the evidence-based argument why this is more plausible than that," or does it mean "I would be happier believing this than that"?

It's part of HN's tradition of gaslighting victims of demographically-targeted violence by ignoring any kind of context and pedantically claiming "it couldn't possibly have been $bad_thing". Of course, because being contrarian is more important than learning about the history of LGBT abuse.

Thank you for this. I expect you'll get down voted or flagged, but my experience as a queer person on hn had absolutely been full of exactly what you describe.

It started out that way (you might have noticed this is a throwaway), but it seems this resonated with people.

Very much this. Do you have an ubsubstantiated conspiracy theory about the evil machinations of bigcorp? Congratulations - upvotes for your wisdom. An actual report of your lived experience of homophobia/racism/sexism/whatever? Hmm, are you sure it's not just in your imagination?

It's nice to not know it's not _actually_ just my imagination haha.

Seconded.

Anecdotal, but even as kids in the early 80s we understood "queer" was "gay" and therefore "bad."

(I absolutely hate that this was ever the case! Wish I had a clue back then)

There was no literal gay element to the game (in our town) but it was still a very hateful name for the game. The message was clear: when you had the ball, you were "queer" and therefore the bad guy and so therefore everybody chased you.

That said, we typically called the game by other names. It had a different name in every town and neighborhood, it seemed. I think we only called it "smear the queer" when we were trying to explain it to kids from elsewhere... it was called "roughie-up" where we lived, but that was apparently hyperlocal, so if the kid was from out of town he might have known it as "smear the queer."

This game has many, many regional names. I heard it called "smear the queer" but we usually called it other names.

It's semi-interesting, though, that the "queer" was the one with the ball.

It took serious guts to be the "queer" for any length of time - after all, it was you vs. everybody else trying to tackle you. The kids who spent the most time with the ball were the fastest, toughest kids. So "queer" was a slur but also, the "queer" was the fast/strong/brave one.

Of course, there are many regional variations. It sounds like in some places, there was no ball involved, and "smear the queer" was just a name for an ass-beating.

I detest this slur now, and I hate that I used to use words like that as jokes/insults. Today I would be fighting alongside my gay friends against folks using those words.

In middlesex county massachusetts in the late 70s, early 80s we called it "kill the carrier". Rough game, I dislocated my elbow playing it. It was a wonder anyone picked up that ball.

Ah! I think we knew it by that name as well. Also: "kill the guy with the ball"... I think... "every man for himself football", the aforementioned regrettable "smear the queer" and "roughie-up" was apparently a very local name for it. Everybody had so many different names for it, I think everybody knew at least a handful of them!

It was sort of unique that way. I didn't know any other game that had dozens of totally unconnected names.

"Kill the dill with the pill" in my school in Australia.

Queer, in particular, is a tough one. Obviously, smear the queer is an awful name for a game. And while queer has a century of being use pejoratively, it's also been adopted as a label by some lgbtq+ folks like myself (often as a way to be more politically forward than using the safer "LGBT" label).

You'll find that there really isn't consensus around the use of queer as an identity -- some in the community hate it, others love it. There's a lot to unpack in its history, and it's continuing to evolve every year.

Yeah. That term that should... probably not be used by folks outside the community, for the reasons you say. LGBT* is probably a safer and more inclusive alternative, so I don't see any real reason for folks outside the community to throw "queer" around. (Aside from perhaps discussions about the term itself, like this one)

That aside, the near-total reclamation of that slur by the LGBT community is such an interesting topic. I can't think of any other slurs that have been quite so fully reclaimed.

I would probably say that positive/neutral use of the term outweighs negative use like 10 to 1 at this point. Maybe 50 to 1.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

I've been really trying to cut out lame, crazy, and mad from my lexicon as of late. It's challenging to break those patterns you learn as a kid.

The coming Tony Hawk game remasters will rename "mute grab" with the support of the person who invented the move for a similar reason.

https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2020/08/13/tony-hawk-pro-sk...

Sometimes it takes a long time for people to think about the words and phrases they pick up.

I understand. "That's gay" was popular enough recently enough that I have some tolerance. I still bring it up though and don't appreciate if it's an ongoing problem they aren't trying to address (or are pretending to try to address).

Fag on the other hand I have very little tolerance for. It's a nasty enough word you don't really drop it accidentally unless you use it regularly in some communities (lots of gamers for instance).

Perhaps i am just a stupid Neanderthal, but the recent urge to "adjust the language" is something i really don't like... i realize it is based on good intentions, but it feels to much like some orwellian newspeak in the making.

I'd disagree if only because it's not going to be enforced by some authority. Personally, I've stopped using some words because I know that they could be offensive to certain groups of people, not because I was pressured to do it or told it's the only way forward. It's just easier to call someone "weird" or "loopy" instead of "crazy", call something "bad" instead of "gay", call them "cigarettes" and not "fags". If someone was pestering me about it all the time, I reckon my base instincts would kick in and I'd go "Well I was going to do it but not anymore." As is, I came to it on my own and haven't felt any discomfort after adjusting my way of speaking.

No one is forcing you. However, it's language that has historically been used to hurt people, so it helps to avoid it if you want to avoid bringing back those memories for people.

When I get called a fag, it reminds me of all the times I got my ass kicked for how I present myself. I won't force people to stop saying it, but I'll mention it and won't associate with them if they don't stop.

Letterkenny had an awesome skit on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjIUG2YN7Y8

> 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....

Just for the sake of pedantry, I should point out that California was ok with them fucking themselves, just not each other.

How far back are you going? IIRC the state sodomy law was repealed in the 70s and it certainly wasn't enforced thoroughly

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_...

California was also considered a lefty-socialist-liberal bastion 12 years 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.

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.

I believe the outcome in 2008 was driven more by differential voter turnout than by California residents changing their opinions between 2008 and 2016.

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.

The biggest swing in support of gay marriage was actually among the silent generation, with support nearly doubling from 2003 to 2013: https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/20...

Interesting [and different from the UK data in many ways] but they're still more opposed than any of the other generations were, and it's pretty clear that increasingly supportive millenials taking over is the driving force. Especially when you consider that as well as becoming more heavily weighted in surveys of overall public opinion, millenials also went from being a political non-factor to compiling much of the media coverage of gay issues their generation and others consume over that time frame.

> 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?

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”

Thanks! I've stopped caring about downvotes, especially for anything even vaguely related to politics.

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