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Comment by djaque | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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