The first time I heard the word gay in a derogatory context, I was on the playground with my then-best friend. This was early middle school, so ... somewhere between 2008–2010. I saw someone I used to be good friends with, and pointed him out. He was in the year above us, and I thought he was the most insanely cool person ever because he wore his uniform jumper sleeves rolled up in such a way that the hems were hidden and the sleeve went all baggy. My friend went very quiet, then she looked at me sidelong and said in a low, cautious voice "But [Art], that makes him look ... gay."
I don't remember if she told me what gay meant then. I was a horridly oblivious child unless something related directly to my interests (it was the autism), so I was used to Not Knowing Things. I do remember that it was like a gate had opened, and suddenly I was noticing people using it everywhere. Those Stabilo lefthanded pens were "gay". The glue sticks that had gone all dry and useless were "gay". You were gay if you rolled your sleeves up, if you let your hands flop limply, if you wore your uniform tie in a certain way. I became intensely embarrassed if a book used "gay" in any context (even though that context was invariably the older "happy or glad" meaning), and worried that someone would see that I was reading something with the Bad Word in it. I don't think any of us got what gay meant, except something to be laughed at, ostracised and avoided.
But what really sticks with me about this, even above the deep-seated homophobia of it all, was the utter resounding silence from adults. We had a teacher in year six (2011/12) who did a series of assemblies about bad language – about how we shouldn't swear, and how we shouldn't call each other cruel names. Nowhere in there did she tell us to stop using gay like an insult. Kids would shriek "ew that's so gay!" loud enough to be heard across the classroom and no teacher ever told them not to say it, but you'd get in trouble for saying damn.
It wasn't until I was in high school – in 2014 – that a teacher called an assembly with our year group and said "Stop it. A pen can't be gay. A wonky eraser can't be gay. Only people can be gay". He then put up those "Some people are gay. Get over it!" posters all around the school and gave negative points to anyone he heard calling inanimate objects gay. As far as educating kids on queer issues goes, this left a lot to be desired – but the bar was already so low you couldn't slide a hair beneath it. Piss poor as it was, that teacher's effort felt utterly revolutionary to me. I knew by then that my uncle was gay, but it still felt like a such a distant and uncomfortable subject because I just didn't know how to approach it. Having someone stand up and say gay without a flinch or a sneer was thoroughly shocking. And it bears repeating: this was in 2014. That's the same year as Juno Dawson's This Book is Gay came out (a book which, incidentally, blew my eyes wide open about a long of things re: my own identity).
The mid '10s were certainly when attitudes shifted, at least in my area of England. Homophobia was still there, but it had stopped being so casually relentless and "cool". When I was looking at high schools in 2012/13, the one I chose had a bad reputation for being "full of lesbians" because it was a same-sex school. When my little sister was looking at high schools in 2016/17, that lingering taboo around the school had almost completely faded. None of her friends even knew about the school's old nickname, which was a homophobic pun on the name (and which people literally used to chant in the street to mock the children who'd decided to attend that school). My sister's peers were all more concerned about the horrible outdated uniforms.
I'm at least four decades away from being anything like a "queer elder" in even the loosest definition of the phrase, but holy fuck thinking about this makes me feel Old. There are people only a handful of years younger than me who don't remember any of this stuff firsthand – and while I am so, so happy that they never went through it, it blows my mind how they can't conceptualise what it was like. It also blows my mind that I can, because I did go through it, and I went through it in a time that most kids think of as being progressive and ~woke~.
We're so, so much closer to our history than most young queers want to realise.
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