# Why was this useage of "queer" offensive? **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [April 5, 2022, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320 "2022-04-05T15:04:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jimmy_Chitwood)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/179 "2022-04-07T20:14:41Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > The connection between the ‘smear the queer’ game and this topic is the question of whether it is _wrong_ or _homophobic_ to use the word ‘queer’ or ‘queers’. The difference is that the post was made to a public space, where _queers_ is usually offensive, as opposed to a private space where it happens that ‘queer’ is known to be free of homophobic connotations. They both happened in the real world, and not the world of platonic forms. The point to you, clearly, is that until a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that a particular person has been in a forest, they may not know about trees. And I think that’s great! ---
**Author:** ![eschrodinger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschrodinger/32/122_2.png) [@eschrodinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschrodinger)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/180 "2022-04-07T20:18:32Z")
Um. I said real-world examples. I would agree that if you could, hypothetically, survey every person in the world, you could prove that the word “tablet” is not homophobic. But no one would need to do that, because no one thinks it is. But it is possible for someone to naiively use, and to naiively hear, a bigoted term, and for that usage to do objective harm. ---
**Author:** ![Atamasama](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atamasama/32/12961_2.png) [@Atamasama](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atamasama)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/181 "2022-04-07T20:24:56Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > And when the kid who played “smear the queer” without knowing what it meant learns the meaning of the word “queer”, he has this history of thinking that “the queer” is worthy of “smearing And full disclosure, when I learned of the other term for “queer” I had a bias against homosexuals. I was a teenager in the 90s. Being a teenager meant I was kind of an asshole, and in the 90s people weren’t very accepting of LGBTQ folks. Remember that the film _Philadelphia_ was released in 1993, and it was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to address homophobia. It wasn’t until years later that I was enlightened; getting to know and befriending gay people helped, growing up helped, and our culture started being more accepting of different sexual orientations. I evolved. I don’t think the game had anything to do with my attitude as a teen, but it did **fit** with it. It might have reinforced it, perhaps. It’s hard to psychoanalyze who I was 30 years ago, since that person doesn’t exist anymore. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/182 "2022-04-07T20:41:04Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > And when the kid […] learns the meaning of the word “queer”, he has this history of thinking that “the queer” is worthy of “smearing”. > > So yes, it is homophobic[…] Deciding a “queer” (the person who is “it” in a game of reverse-tag) is worthy of being tackled on account of their being the “queer” (“it”) is not homophobic. It has nothing to do with prejudice on the basis of orientation. Deciding a “queer” (gay person) is worthy of tackled on account of their being “queer” (gay) is homophobic. This is explicit prejudice on the basis of sexual orientation. If, twenty years from now, the word “stranger” acquires an incredibly homophobic connotation, that doesn’t make our use of it homophobic _today_. Our “stranger danger” lessons _today_ aren’t homophobic based on some future meaning of the word "stranger’. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/183 "2022-04-07T20:53:04Z")
> [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](#): > > The point to you, clearly, is that until a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that a particular person has been in a forest, they may not know about trees. And I think that’s great! I’m sorry, but I don’t think I properly understand your analogy. I know, ironic, since I used the tree _falling_ in the forest analogy. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/184 "2022-04-07T20:56:25Z")
> [@eschrodinger](#): > > But it is possible for someone to naiively use, and to naiively hear, a bigoted term, and for that usage to do objective harm. This I agree with. If even one person makes the connection, then you have a problem. I thought you were arguing that if everybody in the room was naiive, there would still be harm. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![eschrodinger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschrodinger/32/122_2.png) [@eschrodinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschrodinger)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/185 "2022-04-07T21:24:43Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > I thought you were arguing that if everybody in the room was naiive, there would still be harm. There will be. You seem to be focusing on conscious intention, and conscious connection. If no one in the room knows any Jewish people or consciously connects the phrase to bigoted concepts, I’m saying that it will still have a harmful effect on their concept of Jews. Which harms them, Jewish people,and society. Because language is fundamental to the construction of culture. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/186 "2022-04-07T22:26:09Z")
> [@eschrodinger](#): > > If no one in the room knows any Jewish people or consciously connects the phrase to bigoted concepts, I’m saying that it will still have a harmful effect on their concept of Jews. If no one in the room mentally connects an utterance of “Jewed them down” to Jews, IMO that specific instance of “Jewed them down” doesn’t harm Jews whatsoever. It _doesn’t_ contribute to a culture of Jewish greed stereotypes because it has no connection to Jews. It doesn’t have a connection to Jews, at least not yet, because _nobody_ ~~in the room~~ mentally connected that specific utterance to Jews. Likewise if no one present mentally connects an utterance of “smear the queer” to gay people, it seems that specific instance of “smear the queer” doesn’t harm gay people whatsoever. In contrast, posting the word “queers” to a public message board where people will read it with a homophobic connotation is directly connected to homophobic culture. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2022, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/187 "2022-04-08T02:43:02Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > If no one in the room mentally connects an utterance of “Jewed them down” to Jews, IMO that specific instance of “Jewed them down” doesn’t harm Jews whatsoever. It _doesn’t_ contribute to a culture of Jewish greed stereotypes because it has no connection to Jews. It doesn’t have a connection to Jews, at least not yet, because _nobody_ ~~in the room~~ mentally connected that specific utterance to Jews. OK. How the hell does one not connect that to Jews? I just don’t get it. “Gypped” I get. It’s a bit obfuscated. The root may not be obvious. But “Jewing down”? I didn’t knowingly meet a Jewish person until I was in college, to my knowledge, but the expression “Jew down” was clearly referencing Jews and the perception they are either cheap, in search of a bargain, shrewd business people, or otherwise value attention to pecuniary detail. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2022, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/188 "2022-04-08T04:18:10Z")
Because it is a given in the hypothetical, > [@eschrodinger](#): > > “Jewed me down.” Where I grew up, this was something I heard on an infrequent but regular basis. The people I knew who used it likely did not intend to be antisemitic. **They used a familiar phrase without thinking about its literal meaning**. In fact, I’m sure some of them would have been horrified to be called on it. Their lack of thought about it was likely influenced by the fact that there were virtually no Jewish people where I grew up. It’s possible that many people they said it to were similarly not clued in to the (obvious) bigotry of the phrase. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2022, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/189 "2022-04-08T04:21:30Z")
But that’s a real-world example, according to the poster. It’s just … odd to me no one noticed that “Jew” there may refer to a Jew. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2022, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/190 "2022-04-08T04:25:22Z")
I’d say it’s like people who say and hear “go to Hell!” (or “how the hell”) without thinking about Hell at all. Jewish people, even. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![eschrodinger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschrodinger/32/122_2.png) [@eschrodinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschrodinger)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2022, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/191 "2022-04-08T05:12:58Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > It doesn’t have a connection to Jews, at least not yet, because _nobody_ ~~in the room~~ mentally connected that specific utterance to Jews. By “mentally” do you mean consciously? ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2022, 10:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/192 "2022-04-08T10:32:23Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > This I agree with. If even one person makes the connection, then you have a problem. I thought you were arguing that if everybody in the room was naiive, there would still be harm. > > ~Max Smear the queer wasn’t a hypothetical name of the game, it was the real name of the game. And, if **Atamasama** was unaware of the meaning of queer, somehow, in the 90s, that doesn’t mean that all of his friends and their parents and any new friends, and any people on the street, and any of the school friends (who may have been gay themselves) wouldn’t know what it meant. Your example of “stranger” becoming a bad word doesn’t work, because it has the timeline backwards. Just like it’s not homophobic when Alice in Alice in Wonderland calls something queer, it wouldn’t be homophobic if someone today played “stranger ball” or whatever, if it later became something different. In this case, queer was already a homophobic slur and had been for decades. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Bravo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_bravo/32/493_2.png) [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2022, 11:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/193 "2022-04-08T11:43:15Z")
Imagine a very young child one day blurts out an extremely offensive racial slur at the breakfast table. The child is not being racist - children parrot the words they hear. For the same reasons, the parents shouldn’t feel affronted or personally attacked by the use of the word. Something shitty happened when the child was exposed to the word, and something shitty might happen down the road. But in this frozen moment in time, is any harm being done? I can’t see how. But what do the parents do? They explain to the child that this word is not to be used - not even in the comfort and security of their own home. Not even if nobody else is around. They explain that it’s bad to say things that are hurtful, **even if you don’t necessarily intend them to be hurtful.** And that’s where this whole “innocent children playing smear the queer” thing breaks down as a useful metaphor for informing behavior on the SDMB. We expect children to learn that a bad thing is bad and that you can’t claim “but I didn’t mean anything by it!” once you’ve been taught otherwise. Around here, discussions about dehumanizing language always seem to go back to this place where posters argue that poor language must always be judged in the context of the individual poster, or that of course **some** language is bad, but the insults **I** use are all in good fun. The difference is that we can tell children that unkind words are hurtful and you shouldn’t use them, but adults often reject the notion outright if it means introspection and personal change. ---
**Author:** ![Crane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crane/32/3495_2.png) [@Crane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crane)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2022, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/194 "2022-04-09T15:17:30Z")
> [@eschrodinger](#): > > By “mentally” do you mean consciously? A Jewish friend frequently used the phrase “I Christianed him down”, which evoked the same connotation. ---
**Author:** ![eschrodinger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschrodinger/32/122_2.png) [@eschrodinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschrodinger)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2022, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/195 "2022-04-09T15:35:21Z")
I don’t think so. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2022, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/196 "2022-04-09T17:24:09Z")
Well, that’s just silly. The boogeyman isn’t popping out of a mirror because of some situationally taboo incantation. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2022, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/197 "2022-04-09T18:33:50Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > The boogeyman isn’t popping out of a mirror because of some situationally taboo incantation. The use of racial/sexual/etc. slurs is forbidden in civilized discourse not because it might lead to imaginary phenomena like boogeymen popping out of mirrors, but because it perpetuates harmful and degrading mistreatment of minoritized groups. Using slurs like the n-word or “Jew down” or “smear the queer”, even if the user isn’t aware of their offensive meaning, helps normalize the use of such terms and increases the likelihood that their offensiveness will come back to bite the user later. Look at what happened when the [British politician Michael Gove as recently as 2012 used the very common expression “welshed on the deal”](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-politics-17184383), meaning backing out of or failing to honor a commitment. That idiom is commonly associated with historic English denigration of Welsh people, and Gove apologized for using it. Neither he nor anybody else gets a free pass on using a term that is widely perceived as offensive just because they weren’t actually thinking of it as offensive or intending any offense. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2022, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320/198 "2022-04-09T21:33:43Z")
No word is forbidden. There happens to be selective outrage. Anyways, my comment was directed at the usage of words in private and how that causes real harm. It should be obvious that that assertion is not a fact. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320.md?page=8) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-this-useage-of-queer-offensive/962320.md?page=10)