A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
From 1/3/2022
When I was a child, they let us out of the classroom twice a day as I recall. We’d go to scream and pound on each other for a while and hurl ourselves into the air or into walls like sentient superballs, and that was recess—again, as I recall. It was a long time ago. It was the olden days: the eighties. The nineteen eighties.
I do remember one recess game that was popular. It was called “smear the queer.”
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
There were real people indicated by the slurs and words we used to use on the playgrounds in the 80s, which we “can’t” say anymore. Perhaps those people experienced those golden olden times—when everyone was much more relaxed—as a MORE polarizing time than now.
I have to say, if I were a gay teacher at my elementary school in the eighties, I might have experienced that time as extremely polarizing.
There were things you "couldn't" say then, too.
Things like, "actually, I'M gay."
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
But "both sides" are fighting—(a formulation that reduces things to only 2 sides).
There’s a lot of strife—and that’s distressing.
Maybe for people who suffer systemic disenfranchisement, the fact of the fight isn’t newly polarizing, because the fact of the fight is a daily reality.
Maybe for those people, the increase in strife actually feels like the first fluttering sign of solidarity.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
We’ve never been more polarized in most of our lifetimes, at least that’s the word. "This polarization is tearing us apart," says the pundit to a nodding panel of pundits.
"We" and "us" and "ourselves' are such interesting words. They leave a trail. You can usually follow them back to the lair of their underlying assumptions.
“We've never been more polarized as a country,” for example, says something clear about who is considered a part of this country, and who is not.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
These days, when the government lets thousands of people die, there’s yelling and fighting about the damage to human dignity and the loss of human life, and the ways we treat marginalized people as disposable.
I’m informed this means we’re far more polarized now.
I think a lot about this: how polarized we all know we are right now, and what a problem we all know it is.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
There was no real controversy at the time about it. No significant outcry. It was the olden times: the 80s, a far less polarized time, when everyone agreed the world’s most powerful government leaving citizens to die was funny, or at least kept quiet about it if they didn’t.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
I don’t know how they all knew it was funny. I guess the way they knew all the other jokes were funny; just a sort of inheritance of shared knowledge about what was funny. They, like schoolchildren, seemed to think that gay people were no more real than werewolves.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
Somewhere around then, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary told jokes to reporters on the record about AIDS—the disease that was killing thousands of gay men, which the administration was ignoring to fatal effect. Everybody in the room on *both sides* laughed & laughed & laughed.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
For those who mourn “we're so polarized now,” I expect the olden 80s were indeed a fine time for you, b/c everybody who saw us play this game was relaxed about it, as far as I could tell. It was a much more relaxed time for everybody, I’m sure; and we were far less polarized.
The eighties were a halcyon time; there were all kinds of words you could say without anybody ever delivering any awareness to you about it.
And we went out for recess, and played our games—which were just games.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
"I can't say" means I CAN say, but if I do, I'll receive awareness of the actual harm I've done to actual people, and I’m told that the delivery of this awareness means that these are far more polarized and divisive times today than they were back in the olden days.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
We had words for these sorts of mythological people besides “the queer,” which we deployed freely at one another, usually as a casual insult. I won’t print those words here, because we “can’t” say those words anymore—which means I know they will harm people if I say them.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
This was pretty much my only exposure to the concept of “the queer” back then. Sure, I heard rumors—of men who wanted to marry men, is how I recall being told—but it was in the same category as say werewolves. There weren’t *really* gay people—if they knew what was good for them.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
I don’t know how we knew about this game. I guess the way we knew all the other games; somebody told somebody who told everybody else. An older brother to a younger brother, maybe, just a sort of inheritance of tradition and knowledge.
It was just a game. A playground game.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
I remember two other things about this game.
1) Nobody in this game ever fought on behalf of “the queer.” Nobody even considered it. I certainly did not consider it. It wouldn’t have made sense. Anyone doing so would have broken the game so fundamentally that it would have stopped making any sort of sense.
2) Being “the queer” was not fun. You didn’t particularly want to be “the queer.” You’d do what it took to avoid it.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
Then when that was over, you’d throw the ball in the air and whoever the ball landed closest to would have to be “the queer,” and usually a guy wouldn’t want to take the ball and would be forced to take it, if he wasn’t tough enough to force somebody else to take it.
It was a rough game, with pretty much all the boys playing it, taking turns being “the queer” and then taking turns in joining the mob brutalizing him.
A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆
"Smear the queer" was tag with a ball added. Whoever held the ball was “the queer.” Everybody else chased “the queer.” You could hit “the queer” as hard as you wanted is my recollection. The thing to do was to get “the queer” on the ground and then everyone would dogpile on.
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