Those of you worried about people losing the “classic” games, fear not. I was in high school a scant seven years ago and Man Ball was quite the social event. At my school we all got a short day every two weeks and that short day was game day. We’d go down to the football field and set up the Man Circle. Everyone moves towards the center (where the ball was), shouldering his neighbors aside as he went. Eventually, someone would get the Man Ball and play would proceed for an hour or three.
Got to be really popular. I think they even started bringing music for the game. Never did get cheerleaders for it, though. (They’d have been, what, Man Girls?)
Last night I was talking with my wife and 2 daughters, and my wife and I were talking about some things when we were young. So I say:
I remember this one time we were having a rock fight on the way to school and Aunt Linda got hit in the head with a rock. Man, there was blood everywhere, and we used my scarf to soak it up…
Their shocked expressions were followed by the question: A rock fight?
Which didn’t sound at all odd to me. I said, Sure, you know, where you and your friends throw rocks at each other.
We played rock tag too but with pine cones in my neighborhood. They didn’t hurt as much. The opened ones at least.
Until one day a pine cone was thrown by me and one kid ducked and the pine cone went inside the open window of a moving truck and hit one of the guys and they almost crashed.
The game was banned ater that and I got grounded for a long time.
Junior high school in the bay area in the early to mid 1980’s. We called it Kill the Pill, with Smear the Queer being the secondary name. We also played a lot of British Bulldog (precisely “bulldog” described above), Butt’s Up (fairly close to the “must catch the ball or get to the wall as fast as possible” game described above, although I don’t remember a limitation on number of hands used to catch).
Other games we played included Prison Ball (similar to the version of Dodgeball in the movie of that name, but each team has a “prison” behind the other team, people who are out go to prison, and you can lob a throw to them which they can then try to peg someone on the other team with, which, if successful, will let them out of prison), and Two Touch (I kick a ball against a wall as hard as I can, attempting to make it travel far away, perhaps roll behind the picnic tables, whatever. Next man in line has to make the ball also hit the wall, via kicking, but only gets to touch it twice. So you ideally want to kick one nice long straight slow roller towards the vicinity of the wall, which you can run along next to, so that then when you’re near the wall you can clobber the ball hard to make the next man get out.)
“Sure I played Gas the Jew as a kid, but I didn’t know what it meant, so it’s OK”… “Yeah, we played Hang the Nigger when I was in second Grade, but it was innocent”…
Well that was kind of my whole point in starting this thread in the first place, that this game we played as kids so innocently has such a truly wrong sounding name to it. Sure, others in the thread have mentioned that they may have called it something else, but the name Smear the Queer wasn’t an alien concept to most posters either.
That being said, I do think that through all the posts the common idea is that as kids we didn’t use it as a bad word, we used the classic definition of queer meaning different, not meaning homosexual. And we were quite happy and gay about it, if you catch my drift. As adults we carry a lot of baggage on certain terms that can be really innocent but we don’t use them that way anymore. Kids are kids and while you might hate the guy with the ball, it isn’t because you think that he has a different sexual orientation than the rest of you.
I’m not complaining about the kids who played it, it’s more like about society in general - that queers like me are actually still being smeared in the real world… and I guess in a sick way, life imitates art (life imitates games?) when a Gay guy in Brooklyn got “smeared” after being chased into traffic and killed a few months ago…
Mostly because the contact is the point. The ball is just a way to facilitate the contact and distribute it so that one person does not become the sole target. This game is usually played by fairly young boys and is more or less a pre-curser to organized football (or other contact sports). It provides some of the elements of the game (running, throwing, catching, hitting, tackling , evasion) in a non-regimented way which allows young kids to get some idea of what the game feels like without messing around with rules and scores. It’s also just good for blowing off energy and (at risk of sounding sexist) boys crave physical contact and roughhousing and this is a gam that provides that. I think most men who played it, and similar games, as kids have fond memories of it because it provided such a primal, unfettered release of energy. Plus, as much as we like to romantacize the violence, there usually wasn’t any anger or malice or intent to injure involved. Mostly I remember a lot of boys banging into each other and laughing their heads off.
I think maybe girls don’t have that same, genetic need to smash into their peers and roll around in the dirt and get hurt a little bit but games like “Smear the Queer” seem to arise organically in groups of pre-adolescent.
But I think that this thread has demonstrated that “queer” is one of those words that has more than one intended meaning and that as kids it had nothing do to with the most common useage today. Dictionary.com shows these as the definitions:
strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer. 4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
Slang: Disparaging and Offensive. a. homosexual.
b. effeminate; unmanly.
Slang. bad, worthless, or counterfeit.
–verb (used with object) 7. to spoil; ruin.
**8. to put (a person) in a hopeless or disadvantageous situation as to success, favor, etc. **
to jeopardize.
–noun 10. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive. a homosexual, esp. a male homosexual.
Slang. counterfeit money.
—Idiom12. queer the pitch, British Informal. to spoil the chances of success.
I think it’s clear that #4 and especially #8 are the meanings used in the name of the game when it’s called “Smear the Queer”. I really don’t think that it means beat up the gay guy, because having posession of a ball does not a homosexual make.
I don’t think that “Smear the ‘put in a hopeless or disadvantageous situation as to success, favor,etc’” makes any sense at all…
And when is the last time you heard queer meaning mentally unbalanced or deranged?
I grew up in the 60’s/70’s, and queer already meant Gay guys… I was already called a queer by kids when I was 10… and they didn’t mean I was deranged. They probably didn’t know what it meant exactly, but they knew it was an insult…
I’m sorry man, and really I come down on the side of support for these kind of things, but come on now. When you hear “Deck the Halls” around this time of year and the line “Don we now our gay apparel” do you assume that everyone is putting on leather chaps or clothes from International Male? The “queer” in Smear the Queer equates out to the guy with the ball has little, if any chance of making it too long when a galloping horde of your schoolmates are bearing down on you according to the definition provided above.
I honestly think the “Smear the Queer” game predates the use of that word as a homophobic slur. It would be interesting to find out when it originated. I would bet that it originally carried the archaic meaning of an “odd man out” rather than the contemporary meaning. I know that the kids I played it with never made any connection of he word to anything but a designation for the kid holding the ball.
But, in all seriousness, doesn’t the fact that the game is/was mostly lighthearted belie the “gay” interpretation? When kids want to be mean, they do still call a kid “faggot” or “gay” or “cocksucker”*. These are not well received, and generally result in further name calling or outright angry violence. If the person with the ball in this game seriously felt he was being labeled gay for the duration of the game, it wouldn’t be a game he’d keep playing, would it? He’d, as I suggested earlier, whip the ball at another kid to hurt him, or throw the ball away and start punching. The fact that so many here have fond memories of it suggests that anger and sincere insult was not a large part of the game.
I think it’s more like “indian giving”, “welshing on a bet” or “gyp’ed”. Even if we as adults understand the etymology and negative stereotyping inherent in these phrases, kids either don’t give a shit or choose to use the innocent meaning of the word, not get bogged down in guilty baggage. They’re not going to sit around coming up with a new name for their game when the old one works perfectly well, because they’re pretty solidly self-absorbed at that age. If it doesn’t hurt them, they don’t really care if it hurts some random person they’ve never met.
I care, of course. And that’s why I’d mention to my kid that it made me uncomfortable, and has he considered what the name of the game is, totally unconsciously, teaching he and his friends about the world. And he’d go like this → :rolleyes: and tell me I’m being silly. And the thought would percolate around his subconscious for a few years and maybe even nag at him a little each time he played. And when he’s 30, he can pay a therapist $150 a hour to sort out his resentment towards his mother, and the circle of life continues…
*And this is Wrong and not tolerated in my presence, mister!
When I was a kid in the early 60’s, we played Smear the Queer. The term Queer back then (in my neighborhood, anyway), meant something odd or unusual.
“Hey! Look at this snake! It has two heads!”
“Man…that’s queer!”
We also enjoyed (aside from whatever sport was in season):
rock/walnut/apple fights. We had cow shit fights as well, but rain gear was required for that particular social activity.
BB gun and slingshot wars were also common. The BB gun was an integral part of another game, the ever popular lets-all-shoot-at-the-huge-hornet’s-nest-and-see-who-can-stay-the-longest.
When I was older, a fun rainy day game was called Killer Ball. We were all herded into the gym, and the Coaches handed out half-inflated volley balls. The object was to maim your opponent with one; shots to the groin area were encouraged/applauded.
Another classic was in our basement, having fun with the dart board and ping pong table. Well, not so much to play darts or ping pong.
In one game, we would run around the table and throw darts at each other, not intending to hit each other so much as to catch them on ping pong paddles.
In another game, we’d put one dart on the ping pong table, and one guy would have to grab it as the others stood around and threw darts at his hand.
Good clean fun!
Re: smear the queer - I really can’t remember if I even knew what homosexuality was while in grade school, and if so, what we called it. Hell, I was a little slow on the uptake - I remember I didn’t appreciate the significance of the year '69 - not sure I really understood it even after someone explained it to me. :rolleyes:
In grade school, we didn’t have any blacks. And my parents never referred to black people as niggers. Don’t recall hearing it from any friends or neighbors either. But Brazil nuts were nigger-toes, we played nigger pile instead of dogpile. And we’d catch a nigger by the toe, instead of a tiger.
Yeah, I recall realizing nigger was less acceptable than the alternative. But I don’t recall feeling the same about “queer.” I can well imagine it was chosen for the connotation “odd man out” and because of the rhyme. But given that kids tend to be such evil little shits, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that we were incorporating homophobic slurs into our play.
Of course, like I said above, in our neighborhood it was funble rumble.
I think this is the key point. The game was fun. You won the respect of your peers by grabbing the ball and giving a good chase before you were finally tackled. At which point you sprang up, everyone was your teammate again, as you chased down the next guy with enough balls to take the ball. Being the one-being-chased was something that garnered you respect. Now, I’m not saying that I’d be happy to hear a son of mine playing it and calling it StQ, but I’m pretty sure that in this case at least, the name was just a name.
