80s/90s kid here. The kids in our neighborhood (myself included) played this game in a big grass lot during the summer. I was oblivious to a lot of slang growing up so ‘queer’ didn’t have any meaning to me other than what I inferred it to mean in the context of the game (namely, ‘the poor sap who has the ball’). I had a blast being the ‘queer’ because I could outrun all the other kids, age be damned.
But my aloofness doesn’t negate the word’s undeniable intent to slight homosexuals. I never adopted the word—again, it had no relevance for me outside of that grass lot on hot summer days—but It’s kind of alarming to think of all the terminology that is absorbed by kids growing up. Even today, use of the word ‘Jew’ as a verb (e.g. ‘he Jewed me down to five dollars above my asking price’) just rattles me, especially when it’s being used by somebody who seems to have just grown up using it without having any evident anti-Jew sentiment. Like ‘queer’, it’s a meme of hatred that is often unwittingly propagated.
