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The Legend of GayBlade

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Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#71

Post by JohnBooty »

acomjean wrote: post #69
JohnBooty wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#72

Post by dragonwriter »

textfiles wrote: post #50
parsimo2010 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

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.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#73

Post by bhfasdhjgdgsuyv »

imesh wrote: post #61
bhfasdhjgdgsuyv wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#74

Post by djaque »

devenblake wrote: post #66
djaque wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#76

Post by devenblake »

djaque wrote: post #74
devenblake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

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.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#77

Post by hnick »

onionisafruit wrote: post #63
djaque wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#78

Post by hnick »

acomjean wrote: post #69
JohnBooty wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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.

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

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#79

Post by bhfasdhjgdgsuyv »

geofft wrote: post #64
parsimo2010 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Legend of GayBlade

#80

Post by justinpombrio »

godelski wrote: post #59
rzzzt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An advertisement that entices you to buy a submarine. Actually, it's a reference to Paul Graham's observation that when news articles start to appear about anything almost simultaneously, it might be the result of a deliberate effort on someone's part to sell something along with all the generated talk: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Isn't this just native advertising?

Close but not quite.

A native advertisement is an ad, dressed up to look like news.

A submarine ad is news. It's true, it's newsworthy (though that seems to be a low bar), it's a perfectly reasonable thing to be published as news. It just... happened not to be discovered by a journalist. Instead it was discovered by a company who hunted for possible news stories that would make them look good or would mention their product, found one, and presented it to a journalist. All nicely researched and ready to go; an easy story. (If this doesn't make sense, Paul Graham explains it better.)

That's my understanding, at least. I'm sure there are tons of shades of grey and no clear boundaries between these things.

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