Yes and yes.
–Cliffy
[hijack] I started a thread to discuss synesthesia here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=147763
[/hijack]
Huh, why stop at green on Thursdays? When I was at school wearing/doing/saying/not wearing/not doing/not saying anything could be produced as rock solid evidence of being gay. The accuser just had to sound convincing enough or be tough enough to beat anyone who disagreed to a pulp.
Fellow midwesterner here, I also was told it meant horny.
Gay version here.
Hmmm…it looks like the coasts read it as gay, the heartland as horny. Any significance to this?
Tuesdays are cornflower blue.
Hmmm… To me, Mondays are red or pink, Tuesdays are yellow, Wednesdays are orange or brown, Thursdays are blue, Fridays are light green, Saturdays are silver or multicolored, and Sundays are white.
Same here…
Its truly amazing what kind of idiotic things schoolkids come up with. In my elementary school, when using the drinking fountain, if you pushed the knob away from you while drinking, it was fine. If you pulled the knob towards you, you were gay. I have no idea who/where that one came from.
Well, in reviewing the reponses, Ive learned (I think)
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Most Americans are aware of an associatian to the wearing green on thursdays, as part of schoolground culture.
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Americans are evenly split on whether the association is gay or horny.
3.In reviewing published locations, I find no geographical correlation other than the “custom” appears exclusive to North America.
This is an interesting lead as to perhaps the origin for this “custom” (I wish there was a better word). I look forward to hearing more on this as I tried Google but learned nothing. Perhaps Irish immigrants brought the custom to North America. Yet I note that jjimm is from Ireland and has not acknowledged the custom there.
How about instead of “custom” we say “peccadillo”? Peccadillo is a perfectly good word that doesn’t get used anywhere near often enough.
FWIW, I was born and bred in the midwest and I always heard wearing green on Thursday = gay and eating green M&Ms any time = horny. So I don’t know how “coastal vs heartland” it is.
I am recalling a story of Oscar Wilde wearing green carnations. I do not know the story’s veracity.
Esprix
Can I get the icon in cornflower blue?
Grew up in central Ohio and was always told that green meant horny.
Oscar Wilde and his admirers did indeed wear green flowers (not necessarily carnations). Noel Coward wrote and prformed a song about it called, not coincidentally, “Green Carnation” in which the wearers of the green carnation are described sarcastically as “womankind’s gift to the bulldog nation.” Funny little song.
As for Judy Grahn, she cites in her book Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds the work of anthropologist Margaret Murray who traces the association back to the Faeries, supposed tribes which inhabited the British Isles in the centuries prior to Caeser’s conquest. Green was their signature colour, supposedly because as hunting folk it helped them blend into their surroundings. Grahn cites some sources which if anyon’es desperate to know I can post.
Grahn also discusses some regional variations on the “green on Thursdays” trope. One Kansas town: green and pink together, especially on Thursday; another Kansas town: green and yellow; a Boston school: orange and yellow on Thursday; Idaho (with people of Welsh descent): yellow; Midland Texas: knots in shoelaces regardless of day.
Sunday: orange 
Monday: blue 
Tuesday: red :mad:
Wednesday: yellow 
Thursday: purple 
Friday: green 
Saturday: indigo ;j
My color choices for the days have been influenced by the planetary colors according to the Golden Dawn.
(Half this thread is already IMHO fodder.)
I saw the title of the OP and immeadiatly thought, “Oh, that means you’re gay.” I grew up in rural Wisconsin, by the way.
Although the green-on-Thursdays rule was often switched to green-on Tuesdays or red-on-Mondays or any other color on any other day, just so that a certain person could be called gay.
Also, if your shirt had a little loop sewn into the back (not sure how to decribed it; it’s usually on button-up shirts) that also meant you were gay. The loop was specifically called a “fag tag.”
And god forbid you wear a green shirt with a fag tag…
I grew up in Arkansas and never heard about wearing green on Thursdays. (I did get sniggered at a lot, though. Maybe I was just the one kid no one ever heard.) Furthermore, green M&M’s, as I recall did mean you were gay! (Only heard this once or twice, though.)
I never heard of any of this rot before. Where I went to school, kids called each other fags ad libitum, without bothering to pin it on any specific marker. Sort of a Hobbesian war-of-words of all against all.
I don’t know about the coasts, but wearing green on Thursdays in Southern Illinois in the 50’s and 60’s was definitely called gay. I never heard “horny” at all.
Chicago, 80s, never heard of any of this.