I heard from Stephen Fry that British soldiers used to walk with their arms linked together like sweethearts until Oscar Wilde was jailed for homosexuality and they all stopped doing it.
IIRC, it’s still common to see male friends walk holding hands in the Middle East for the same reason.
One of my favourite UK daytime TV shows is one where middle aged (and older) rich people buy houses in the countryside.
It’s aimed at right wing, house price obsessed, retired people.
Every third couple is gay.
The show always describes them as “lifelong friends”.
Like, I’ve got friends I’ve known for most of my life. I’ve never considered buying a house in the Cotswolds and moving in with them…
Tom and Steve are an interior decorator and fitness instructor, and lifelong friends. They are looking to move to brighton into a new house together, as they are looking to adopt some kids and their old studio flat they shared for 10 years in soho is too small to raise children, but they are not gay or anything like that.
As opposed to what? “modern” homie messaging?:
me and my homies (tw: gay, maybe sexy?)
we’re both hererosexual and i have a gf
Also historians: gay meant happy back in the day. Of course it did, how could so many people be gay, back in the day.
(Yes, I know it really did mean that…)
Gay was one of those substitution words to imply a different meaning, that eventually became the word itself. No one wanted to say “homosexual,” so they instead said that some guy was “gay” (happy) around other men. Wink, wink.
Eventually, it got overused to the point it became synonymous with homosexual, and now that’s the preferred term. For a while it became a slur, but gay people have reclaimed it over the years. Bigots still try to use it as a slur, but it has very little effect nowadays.
“Light in the loafers”
‘Queer’ however still sounds like an insult to me
I’ll never understand how Q made it into the official lexicon and F was suddenly too horrendous to speak. My gay friends called themselves F’s. I called them F’s. But queer was insulting, off the table.
Queer smells of it’s original meaning, there’s something off about you, something wrong with you.
Yeah, it makes me feel othered and stigmatised. I know that some LGBT+ people identify with that term and they can do what they like, but for me it still feels exclusionary and judgemental.
I have to agree that one will never sit right with me. Not after realizing once I was a teenager how fucked up it was that they toaght as a game as small children and told us it was called “smear the queer.” The implications are absolutely vulgar and grotesque, as well teaching small children that LGBTQ+ people should be “othered.” It isn’t for me to say, and if that’s how people identify, that’s OK, but there will always be that little twinge with that word for me
In elementary school, my classmates played “smear the queer,” during recess one day. They were chasing me around the playground and punching me over the head, back, and shoulders. The PE coach was walking by and started yelling all of us, myself included, that what we were doing was very hurtful to a lot of people.
So the other kids asked the coach, “can we play ‘get the Jew’?” She said that was fine and the kids went back to chasing me and beating me.
I’ve never understood how “hurt xgroup” was a fun game but only if you chose the right group to malign…
