Last night at the skatepark, I got into an argument. Or rather, a kid approached me and started an argument with me, using the classic macho prompt: “You got a problem with me?”
“Yes!” I informed him, “You’re in everyone’s way all the time.”
Words: Tobias Coughlin-Bogue
Some context: this particular individual is one of those dudes who dodders around the skatepark with his headphones in and his eyes down. It would cost him about three milliseconds to glance up and read the room every now and then, given that he’s decided to opt out of hearing it, but he can’t even suffer that. And we all suffer for it. We wait for what we think is a clear shot, approach whatever obstacle, and suddenly find this galoot stumbling off another hopeless flip trick attempt directly into our path of travel. He also takes his sweet time to clear the area after bailing a trick, another of the most selfish things you can do in a crowded skatepark.
Skate etiquette is a tenuous compact, to be fair, but this guy is so egregiously in violation of it at all times that it’s impossible to give him the benefit of the doubt. At least for me. When I see him snake my friends who are too nice to speak up about it, it makes my blood boil. Suffice to say, I am not too nice to speak up about it.
He knows I don’t like him, and this confrontation was clearly premeditated. He was not making a genuine attempt to resolve our differences. As soon as I told him what my issue was, he was off to the races. All up in my face, giving me the whole list of reasons I was a shitty person with a shitty attitude. There’s certainly an argument to be made for that, and there is no law requiring you to like your fellow skaters, but my issue here actually isn’t with his issue.
It’s with the fact that, after a few moments of heated back and forth, he drew himself up, pointed at me, and said, “You know what you are? You’re a faggot.”
People sure do love to tell on themselves these days, but I have to admit I didn’t expect it. Especially not at a skatepark in Seattle that has a large poster welcoming people of all genders, races, and sexual orientations—“Except Nazis!”—prominently displayed in the entryway.
I was dumbfounded for a second, trying to parse out whether he knew that I am, technically speaking, a faggot, or was just using that very loaded pejorative to lend weight to his pronouncement. He did not know, of course, which is worse in a way.
If I was actually rolling around the skatepark with a rainbow bandana and hot pants on, or whatever his myopic stereotype of gay people is, and he wanted to let me know that he disapproved of my sexuality, that’d be one thing. That kind of hate is much easier to resist, because it’s out in the open.
But the cowardly kind of hate? The hate that happens when people think they can get away with it? When it’s just the guys? Fuck that shit forever.
That kind of hate is, in case you were wondering, the reason why more women, queers, and trans folk don’t feel welcome in traditional skate culture. You don’t get called a faggot or a bitch or a tranny to your face all that often, but you know what goes on when it’s just the guys. I certainly do, having been an undercover queer in the boys’ club of skateboarding for years. I’ve gotten to hear what kind of terrible shit people say when they think it’s safe to, and what my irate friend said was just another unwelcome example.
Had my antagonist known I was actually queer, he assured me, he wouldn’t have said that particular word. But that’s beside the point. The fact that he chose that word to wound me tells me everything I need to know about how he feels about gay people.
What people like that don’t realize is that the language they use has a profound effect on the way they see the world. The ol’ Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, not that I would expect too many skaters to be familiar with it. To put it simply, you can’t call people faggots when you’re annoyed with them, even if you don’t think they actually are one, without reinforcing a negative perception of homosexuality in your mind. You can’t sit around with your bros talking about the “ass on that bitch,” without slowly rotting your brain to the point where you see women only as sexual objects.
But skaters really live like this and don’t see any issue.
Torey Pudwill thinks trans people are to be snickered at:
Nicky Diamonds, skateboarding’s living, breathing monument to late capitalism, thinks women are for chasing and screwing:
My guy Peyton, who I run into at the skatepark almost daily, thinks you should “#nevertrustabitch.”
Another local dude, who lives two blocks down from me and my very lesbian roommate, thinks it’s high praise to tell our buddy Joe that his very, very sick OJ Wheels “NW Connection” part contained, “No gay shit.” My filmer friend Wil, who I see nearly every time I see Peyton, must agree, because he liked that comment. As did Joe.
It’s never out in the open, but it’s always there beneath the surface, sitting at the skatepark next to you or living right down the block. Instagram, as Ashley Feinberg has demonstrated so well, with her reporting on the modern Republican Party’s social media habits, makes it harder to hide these hateful views, but the old boys’ club is absolutely still open for business.
Frustratingly, I don’t think most of the people in that club in 2019 would describe themselves as homophobic, transphobic, or sexist. My irate friend at the skatepark doesn’t think I’m an asshole because I’m a faggot, he just thinks I’m a shitty person with a shitty attitude and therefore… I’m a faggot. Right. As evidenced by the above screenshots, Peyton has no problem with women in general, he just thinks that they’re all conniving, evil succubi. I must have missed the nuance there.
I’m guessing Pudwill would argue that his post was a harmless joke, though the trans people who are the butt of it might not agree. As a million commenters jumped in to remind us, if you see a screw on a skateboard literally chasing down a nut with sexy, feminine legs and think, “That’s extremely rapey,” you’re a sad, triggered snowflake. And “no gay shit” just means it was good skating, right? It doesn’t, say, imply that being gay makes you bad at skateboarding and unworthy of admiration. Heavens no!
What I want more than anything, after my little row at the skatepark, is for everyone to think long and hard about where they stand. Do you really think gender dysphoria is a joke and trans people are an aberration? Fucking come out and say it. Do you hate gays and want Mike Pence to ship us all to reeducation camps? Tell this faggot how you really feel. Want women to stay out of the skatepark? Don’t post about it, be about it.
But I’m guessing you won’t. I’m guessing this kind of shit happens behind closed doors, or via Instagram, where people have lulled themselves into a false sense of privacy, because they are ashamed of their bigotry. They gripe to their friends about political correctness, about being language policed, because they’re unwilling to admit that their politics and their language are abhorrent.
If you take that long look inside yourself and you find that, by some miracle, your moral compass guides you to the right side of history, I would urge you to reconsider the language you use. If you believe in inclusion and human rights, language plays a very real role in creating that reality. If you just want to avoid being criticized for the fact that you don’t believe in those things, well, then I think it’s high time you owned up to that.
