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Comment by hjfhjkh | Hacker News Reader

Homophobia is the accepted term for this kind of thing in both Dutch and Swedish, so you shouldn't feign surprise that "fear" comes into the terminology.

The Netherlands and Sweden are among the most LGBT-tolerant countries in the world. Not having to worry (much) about homophobia is a huge privilege.

The way you are talking, it sounds like you are neither gay nor have you ever given much thought to the plight of gay people in the large parts of the world where homosexuality is not tolerated, including the many places where it is still a crime.

The "polarized" US is not as gay-friendly as the typical European country, but other places are much worse.

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Yes, homophobia is a thing even in NL; what I think the GP post was trying to point out is that there’s been no connection between inline skating and any particular sexual orientation in NL. That rings true to me as another Dutchman who owns inline skates (though only for three years).

Well there's a more fundamental dependency we don't have an answer to -

Is it common in either language (or perhaps English is used in this context) to make fun of things that disgust you by calling them gay? Growing up in the Midwest of the US in the early 90s, I knew to call things 'gay' if I wanted to discourage my friends from doing them much earlier than my Christian parents allowed me to find out the secret of males/females having different genitalia. (A much younger neighbor boy finally leaked the secret to me when I was 12.)

Yes in Sweden I did it in 1990 even though I grew up in an evironment were being homosexual was normal. Still being gay was not cool in society, and they were gravely mistreated. We still have a long way to go.

There is a surprising amount of homophobia in Friends - possibly one of the most famous TV shows of all time.

Like the extensive racism in Fresh Prince, the homophobia in Friends is brushed aside because "it was the 90s"

it's easy for people to look at 90's/2000's vernacular and assume a level of explicit bigotry that simply was not necessarily present. kids will always be drawn to an easy shorthand to use as a pejorative, preferably one that distinguishes them from earlier generations and makes their parents mad. they will probably start using the term through osmosis without even understanding its webster definition because that won't be their definition. gay/fag has basically been superseded by cuck/cringe/simp etc and those terms will similarly be replaced by something else within 5 years but functionally all these terms end up fulfilling the same purposed which is very quickly divorced from their actual dictionary meaning, should one even exist.

Not sure. We all knew what it meant when I was a kid in the 90s. That doesn’t mean that people were thinking homophobic thoughts every time they called something gay. But the underlying idea that being gay was icky and bad was perfectly well known to all of us at the time.

Society finally seems to have figured out that using ‘gay’ as an insult is homophobic and wrong. However, on the way to that realization, we did have to go through a long period of various groups of people insisting that they had their own special definitions of ‘gay’, ‘fag’, etc. that allegedly had nothing to do with the ordinary meanings of these words. It retrospect I think it’s clear that protests of this sort were all entirely specious (with the exception of young kids who simply didn’t know what they were saying).

To come to OPs defense, I also used the term gay a lot as a negative word growing up. I never knew any gay people, we just used it as an alternative for softy. My parents never explained what being gay meant, I had no openly gay relatives. I understand now it is painful for gay people and I probably did know some, they just laid low, partly because of using gay as a negative. Needless to say I don’t use the term like that anymore. But it was never consciously anti-homosexuals. Like Eminem who did a duet with Elton John to prove his point. Doesn’t make it right of course. I apologize for using the word. I also used to think nothing of black face, even defended the tradition, now I changed my mind.

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