Dial Up. Yeah I know the sound and I know the time it took to load anything with. But it’s something I won’t ever miss having. I would much rather be on a 1MB connection if I had to choose between that or dial up ever again. I also hated how easy it was to be kicked off, if anyone called the phone, you were off it in seconds.
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I remember this vivedly and I’m straight.
In high school, I was very awkward socially (decades later I could find out that it’s autism, but at that point it was just called “he’s shy and awkward”). I had a group of bullies who would follow me around taunting me.
Usually, they’d leave me alone if they were alone with me, but there was one exception. One of my bullies loved pretending to come onto me in the locker room. As if being in your underpants changing in front of other guys wasn’t embarrassing enough as a teen, this guy would pretend that he was gay (he definitely wasn’t) and that he was attracted to me.
I remember feeling ashamed of being identified by someone as possibly being gay. (A feeling that present day me realizes wasn’t right, but I was a teenager and being gay wasn’t widely accepted then.) I wanted desperately to prove that I was straight, but had no way of doing that. (See above about being extremely awkward socially - I didn’t have my first date until about a decade later.)
In my area of the world where queerness is still criminalised, people still use those terms openly.
Yeah because by that point, men weren’t allowed to have feelings. Men had to be…Men who did MAN things. Working on cars - MAN thing. Drinking beers - MAN thing. Doing lumberjack or other fields of intensive labor - MAN thing. There was no room for these things called emotions because that made you a BOY and we need to separate the boys from the men! That was the kind of rhetoric that was instilled in male society for decades up to that point.
And it took someone like an animated character like Kenshiro from an anime to show people that it’s actually okay for guys to have feelings. In a show where he does an awful lot of manly things.
It was pretty popular into the early 2000s as well as far as I’m concerned. Just not in media as much.
Options for word choices have diminished and aren’t as edgy, but I still see men call each other cupcakes and removed in lieu of using more classical words.
Edit: Guess there’s some pretty strong word filters here. It was the b-word in case anyone was wondering. Feel like I’m in elementary school…
I grew up in the 90’s being called fag/faggot a lot and I wasn’t even queer until like, my junior year of highschool when I discovered yaoi.