Going to gym class was ultimately a lugubrious experience. It either ended in complete humiliation in the boy’s locker room where penis size was only ever trumped by jokes about girl’s breasts, or towel snapping becoming an Olympic event. All of these subjects were completely foreign to me. Even at 16, I had a sense of what was or wasn’t considered good taste. Saying so was what put me at the front of the Wedgie Line. Luckily, I had one saving grace: my sense of humor. Even the bulliest of bullies laughed at my ability to make a total fool of myself in front of large groups of people. I was always hounded, always picked last, and always shoved first, but I was able to turn any situation into a punch line, no matter what the outcome. This, among everything else I did, drove the school bullies crazy. It’s a gift I’ve since parlayed into career, oddly enough.
However, there was one game, usually played indoors, and always, without question, was ultimately Male. In all four years in High School, I never once witnessed a girl playing Dodgeball.
Or as I remember it: ‘Smear The Queer.’
Without going into a long, sad story of my Carrie existence in high school, the choice for the best queer should be painfully obvious. As a side note, I must say that because of four years of nose diving out of the way of numerous, high speed on-coming rubber balls, I can now run across the freeway without any fear of getting run over — assuming of course, that the cars are made of out rubber. But I did notice that the Queer wasn’t always your truly; it depended on who had the ball.
If you’re not familiar with Smear The Queer, the game consisted of two teams of boys on either side of the gym. There’s one very large, very painful ball per team, and the hour is spent with one boy on either side hurling the ball at top speed into the face of another boy on the opposite team. Once you hit someone in the face properly and the boy goes down in a puddle of blood and snot, that team picks up the ball and reciprocates. Really hard. It’s basically a game of blame and violence. I was one of the lucky ones. I was fast and I was crafty. I knew well enough that the best way to not get hit was to use my other teammates as human shields, without their knowledge. I’d basically cower behind the biggest boy on my team and patiently wait for him to go down. Then I’d make some stupid, off-color joke and get people laughing long enough for me to run like a squirrel with its tail on fire to the opposite end of the gym. There I’d wait until I could find another unsuspecting victim.
The game, in and of itself, was basically two groups of people throwing things at one another in order to not have to communicate so it didn’t really matter who was who.
It didn’t start off as a personal vendetta, but slowly. Over time, as things were said and words exchanged, it became a free-for-all against any and all traitors of Normalcy. It helped if there was someone on the other side that you already had a disdain for. That only made the throwing that much sweeter. Violence and winning were the end results. There was no real skill attached, or use of communication. Even when the ball was coming at your own team mate, as long as it wasn’t you that was being targeted, just getting out of the way was the point. And I was just as guilty. I was actually pushing people in front of me in order to be the last man standing.
And then immediately going into my best Jerry Lewis.
There are people on the United States Congress right now who call themselves Constitutionalists. And there are other people in the Congress who hate them for it. There are Americans who are drowning in their own vitriol because of the term ‘Tea Party,’ and there are Americans who when they hear the term ‘Liberal’ turn multiple shades of puce. America has recently been downgraded. We’ve turned from the kinds of people who shop at Chanel to those who coupon clip and pray for a sale at Marshalls. Our lives are different now than they were at the beginning of the year. Our way of being, of understanding, of communicating, and of receiving can longer be the same. We can’t keep walking around the planet pretending nothing’s happened.
And yet, even though all this is true, and all this has happened,
we’re all engaged in the biggest game of Smear The Queer the world has ever seen. And everyone seems to know it — but us.
There’s a divide. There’s a gap in the middle of us all. There’s a massive canyon that separates us in a way that’s not only unhealthy and unproductive, it’s dangerous and lethal. There are people hiding behind other people in order to push them in the front of the line, and there are people with the ball that just keep throwing it with such physical force, no one on the other side can see it coming. And people are going down. They’re giving up. They’re surrendering. And most importantly, no one seems to understand that if we simply stop playing the game, the game itself will stop. You can’t play Smear The Queer without the Queer.
I don’t think America’s going to fall apart. I don’t think this is the beginning of the end. I have great faith in our people and in our government, and in our way of life. I don’t think we’re headed towards some kind of Kool-Aid drinking ending. I do think though, that we’ve got to take responsibility for what we’re doing to each other.
We can only point fingers at the Republicans, the Democrats, the Presidents, and our other representatives for so long before we find out there’s really only one group largely to blame: Us. We have to have the guts to look in the mirror and speak the truth about what’s happened to the economy and why we needed that house we couldn’t afford,
or that credit card we really didn’t use, or start up that company simply to hide more money. No one made us do this; we did it and we loved it because we weren’t getting caught. See, if you push someone ahead of you and hide behind them fast enough, no one knows why the guy went down nose first into the cement. You can just stand there with your arms raised and go into your Jerry Lewis.
The divide is getting bigger. It’s getting wider and larger and when we sit on our couches and blame Fox News, or MSNBC, that doesn’t really change anything. The only reason those programs are successful, is because we watch them. If we didn’t watch then, they wouldn’t be on. It’s really that simple. If we stop the game, if someone grabs the ball and puts it down, or simply decides not to throw it, no one will get hit. And then, as we all stand around the gym panting and frightened, we’d have to do the one thing everyone’s most terrified of. We’d have to speak to each other. From our hearts. Not The Truth, but Our Truth. We have to take a minute and pause this game, because no one’s winning.
Let me be clear: I’m not saying no one has the right to get or be angry. I’m not saying we all have to sit in a corner with a lit candle singing John Denver songs. I’m angry. I want revenge. I need to scream and shake my fists and tell people to go to hell and to stop being so single minded and archaic and prejudice. I need to do that. But it seems to me that that’s all we’re doing. There’s very little aim and purpose. It’s simple backlash.
I remember the couple of times I got the ball in my hand. Standing there, as the center of attention and with all the power, I remember holding that ball above my head and watching everyone scramble. And I threw it as hard as I possibly could. The unfortunate aspect was that, even back then, I threw like a girl. I ended up knocking out the bleachers. But the other team still ran.
The rules of the game were simple and we all agreed to them, but I noticed that as the game went on and as people just wanted to win no matter what, the game seemed to change. Some guys ran and hid, some guys grabbed an extra ball, and some used people as human shields. There was no end result. Nothing was ever solved. Nothing was ever done. The game went on until everyone was bloody and beaten.
I don’t remember at any time, that there was one man left standing. It seemed to be a game about vengeance, not strategy.
And then, we returned the next day, cleaned up, pretending not be hurt, and humiliated and did what we were supposed to do every time a new game was played:
Searched for the New Queer.