[the_third_wave]

What happened is that I moved to the Swedish countryside and as such was confronted with hills and unpaved roads. When I lived in the Netherlands I used skates for transport in lieu of a bicycle because they're far easier to take along on public transport. I skated to the station, skated into the train, skated off it after 1.5 hours and 150 km, skated to my job and repeated this on my way home. I was just as fast as if not faster than most cyclists. Every now and then I skated to my parents, an 75km trip which took a while.

I never - and I mean never - heard anything about "skating being gay, that might be an American thing? To even consider homophobia (fear of homosexuals?) in this context is completely foreign to me and probably says more about the polarised society in the USA than about anything else.

Skates are practical means of transport in flat countries with good infrastructure like the Netherlands. They are not in the part of Sweden where I now live, otherwise I'd still be on them every day. A bicycle works fine here so I reverted to my original means of locomotion.

[ahartmetz]

You might have just given me a solution to a problem I thought about this weekend: a place I need to visit for work is >= 1 km from the next public transport stop - the walking is a little tedious. I was using my car for pandemic (currently: train strike) reasons, but I want to stop that again after, and I do own rollerskates... still from the 90s.

[the_third_wave]

Go for it, wear some wrist protectors and you should arrive in one piece. That is the only protection I use given that it actually work as intended and broken wrists are fairly common in all forms of skating.

[faeyanpiraat]

The first thing hitting the concrete when falling is your palms, so having a glove with plastic protection will help not losing any skin from your palms.

Also wear a helmet.

[noduerme]

When I was a 13 or so, in the early '90s, I took an "extreme rollerblading" class on the weekends. The class started by teaching various kinds of stops (T-stop where you drag one skate behind you sideways, spin stop ...no one ever used a brake), and then moved on to going down stairs, performing jumps, and so on. We were required to wear elbow, knee and wrist guards as well as helmets. But one thing they taught us early on was how to fall correctly, or come to a falling stop. You want to try to go down with a kneepad first followed by the wrist guard, so you're using the knee to brake. This was something we practiced.

It's been over 20 years since I was on rollerblades and I don't even know if I'd have the balance anymore, but I wouldn't do it without at least one knee guard and both hard wrist guards.

[the_third_wave]

I nearly entirely rely on the T-stop, most of my skates never had any brakes and I removed it from the ones which did since it is only in the way and of questionable efficacy. The disadvantage of dragging a skate is the enormous wear it puts on wheels but apart from that it serves me well. Knee protection might work for some but I never felt the need and just feel those things are in the way, the same goes for elbow protection. Having skated for decades without damaging either knees or elbows I'll probably be OK but by all means use them when you're just starting off, I did this as well.

[noduerme]

My favorite were spin stops - I'd do that 90% of the time, or drag a T until I was slow enough to do one. The other problem with a T is your foot can catch if you're on a sidewalk. But playing hockey I would intentionally take a knee sometimes, so I think that would still be something I'd do automatically.

[motardo]

> The first thing hitting the concrete when falling is your palms

Yes, if you're young and have good reflexes, you can break your wrists. If you're old with slower reflexes, you can't get your arms out in time so you break your hip instead.

[scrollaway]

If you're looking for good gloves for rollerblading I recommend looking at motorbiking gloves. They're a bit expensive but they can be super comfortable and have a ton of protection around the wrist and knuckles.

[the_third_wave]

Motorbike gloves do not include the essential part of wrist protectors, namely the hard plastic backbone which is meant to catch the fall and keep the wrist joint from overextending. If you want to wear them, fine, but make sure to use wrist protectors - with a rigid backbone - as well.

[scrollaway]

Not all of them do but as far as I can tell some of them definitely do. I don’t ride motorbikes so I’m not an expert in this but my friend who does showed me her gloves which do include wrist protectors. I’m in Europe if it makes a difference…

[elliekelly]

This is exactly why I stopped rollerblading. I had a coach who made us all sign “contracts” promising we wouldn’t rollerblade because so many players were injuring their wrists.

[hjfhjkh]

Homophobia is the accepted term for this kind of thing in both Dutch and Swedish, so you shouldn't feign surprise that "fear" comes into the terminology.

The Netherlands and Sweden are among the most LGBT-tolerant countries in the world. Not having to worry (much) about homophobia is a huge privilege.

The way you are talking, it sounds like you are neither gay nor have you ever given much thought to the plight of gay people in the large parts of the world where homosexuality is not tolerated, including the many places where it is still a crime.

The "polarized" US is not as gay-friendly as the typical European country, but other places are much worse.

[dochtman]

Yes, homophobia is a thing even in NL; what I think the GP post was trying to point out is that there’s been no connection between inline skating and any particular sexual orientation in NL. That rings true to me as another Dutchman who owns inline skates (though only for three years).

[silverpepsi]

Well there's a more fundamental dependency we don't have an answer to -

Is it common in either language (or perhaps English is used in this context) to make fun of things that disgust you by calling them gay? Growing up in the Midwest of the US in the early 90s, I knew to call things 'gay' if I wanted to discourage my friends from doing them much earlier than my Christian parents allowed me to find out the secret of males/females having different genitalia. (A much younger neighbor boy finally leaked the secret to me when I was 12.)

[odessacubbage]

it's easy for people to look at 90's/2000's vernacular and assume a level of explicit bigotry that simply was not necessarily present. kids will always be drawn to an easy shorthand to use as a pejorative, preferably one that distinguishes them from earlier generations and makes their parents mad. they will probably start using the term through osmosis without even understanding its webster definition because that won't be their definition. gay/fag has basically been superseded by cuck/cringe/simp etc and those terms will similarly be replaced by something else within 5 years but functionally all these terms end up fulfilling the same purposed which is very quickly divorced from their actual dictionary meaning, should one even exist.

[foldr]

Not sure. We all knew what it meant when I was a kid in the 90s. That doesn’t mean that people were thinking homophobic thoughts every time they called something gay. But the underlying idea that being gay was icky and bad was perfectly well known to all of us at the time.

Society finally seems to have figured out that using ‘gay’ as an insult is homophobic and wrong. However, on the way to that realization, we did have to go through a long period of various groups of people insisting that they had their own special definitions of ‘gay’, ‘fag’, etc. that allegedly had nothing to do with the ordinary meanings of these words. It retrospect I think it’s clear that protests of this sort were all entirely specious (with the exception of young kids who simply didn’t know what they were saying).

[comprev]

There is a surprising amount of homophobia in Friends - possibly one of the most famous TV shows of all time.

Like the extensive racism in Fresh Prince, the homophobia in Friends is brushed aside because "it was the 90s"

[pastage]

Yes in Sweden I did it in 1990 even though I grew up in an evironment were being homosexual was normal. Still being gay was not cool in society, and they were gravely mistreated. We still have a long way to go.

[teekert]

To come to OPs defense, I also used the term gay a lot as a negative word growing up. I never knew any gay people, we just used it as an alternative for softy. My parents never explained what being gay meant, I had no openly gay relatives. I understand now it is painful for gay people and I probably did know some, they just laid low, partly because of using gay as a negative. Needless to say I don’t use the term like that anymore. But it was never consciously anti-homosexuals. Like Eminem who did a duet with Elton John to prove his point. Doesn’t make it right of course. I apologize for using the word. I also used to think nothing of black face, even defended the tradition, now I changed my mind.

[mkl]

You spent >3 hours a day just commuting? I can't imagine doing that. What did you do on the train?

[the_third_wave]

Read, work, speak to people, look out of the window, drink some tea, nothing at all - there are many ways to spend time in a train. The commute would have been just as long (if not longer) by car but that would be time wasted instead of time for myself. Seeing those traffic jams from behind the train window (in the morning, by the time I went home the evening rush was already over) just was the icing on the cake, imagine sitting there in a tin can, waiting for the tin can in front of you to move, with another tin can behind you waiting for you to move...

[emodendroket]

If my commute were 3 hours, regardless of mode, I'd either move or find a new job.

[the_third_wave]

I did, eventually, first by going to Canada and Alaska to paddle the Yukon down to the Bering strait, then to Sweden 'cause I met a Swedish girl. Had I not met her I'd have moved to Canada instead, that was my original plan. But... the job was fun, it paid well, I was single, I bought a house which I sold for twice the price after 6 years (before I moved to Sweden) so in that respect everything worked out as intended. I would not do this at this time and place given that I'm not single, I have children, I live on a farm in the woods and I have gigabit fibre which makes it possible to reach the world at the speed of light...

[fxtentacle]

In Germany you can buy a yearly subscription for your daily commute train and that comes with a reserved seat and table and power plug for charging your laptop. From my observations, people are usually finishing powerpoint slides and answering emails during their commute.

[the_third_wave]

I had a Dutch "OV Jaarkaart", a pass which is valid in all forms of public transport in the whole country, at any time. No reserved seats and no power plugs in the 90's of the last century, laptops were not as common as they are now and I got quite a few looks when I hooked up a Sony mobile brick to mine to remotely dial in to my box in the IT cave we called home. I usually wrote articles and proposals, hacked on random stuff or tried to build software I'd found on freshmeat.net or elsewhere.

[masklinn]

> You spent >3 hours a day just commuting?

Sad to say but a lot of people have car commutes in that range. The Bay has tens of thousands of "supercommuters" whose commute is 90mn or above.

In Europe train commutes in that range are probably more reasonable: you can sleep in the train (super common for the early HSRs), or it can count as part of your work-day (e.g. handle your mail or whatever, a good train seat often works just as well as an office desk).

I've known quite a few people who worked in large cities but wanted to live in the countryside (or at least in smaller cities, way out from even what's usually considered suburbs), they'd take regional or even high-speed train into and out of paris. Not necessarily cheap (especially if you take HSR), but frequent rider and (usually) company contribution made that surprisingly realistic.

[sameerds]

Not the GP, but I used to commute two hours each way for college in Mumbai (including a switchover and long walks to/from the train stations). Used some of that time to finish assignments if I got a seat!

[vanderZwan]

More likely twice a week: at the start of the weekend when going home to parents (and their washing machine), and at the end of it when going back to uni.

[the_third_wave]

Nope, 5 days a week, left home around 07.00, came home around 21.00. I even had a washing machine all of my own together with a house to put it in. I actually had a washing machine as a student as well, it was old but it worked - until a house mate destroyed it, that is.

[hamburglar]

What did you teach that washing machine? :)

[runarberg]

When I lived in the Mission in San Francisco 10 years ago, I found rollerblades to be the best way of traveling medium distances in the city (e.g. to the Civic Center). I didn’t have a safe place to store a bike, busses are super slow (and if I’m going longer distances, I can take them off and hop on a muni). I never heard of the homophobia angle either.

[foldr]

‘Homophobia’ is the standard term in English for prejudice against gay people. It does not mean ‘fear of homosexuals’ (regardless of etymological considerations).

[Supermancho]

> It does not mean ‘fear of homosexuals’ (regardless of etymological considerations).

It does mean "fear of being perceived as homosexual". There are backwards people. The stigma that some may ascribe, is rarely removed. If they are in a position of power, this can hurt you professionally or socially, despite modern moral standards.

[hamburglar]

Fear of being perceived as a homosexual is a type of homophobia, but homophobia is not necessarily a fear of being perceived as a homosexual.

[Supermancho]

I don't think most people are arguing about that. Some post that puts forth "it doesn't mean this it means that" can be charitably added to with additional interpretation rather than "wrong. it's THIS". Dead-end true-scotsman argument.

[foldr]

I think you’ve got slightly the wrong end of the stick. No-one thinks that rollerblading went out of style because people were afraid of gay people. So the OP’s inaccurate (or at best overly narrow) assumption regarding what ‘homophobia’ means is leading them to misunderstand the claim about what happened. These days the term ‘homophobia’ is very rarely used to refer to a literal phobia of gay people.

(The OP said ‘fear of homosexuals’, not ‘fear of being perceived as homosexual’.)

[hamburglar]

Except I am literally responding to your very specific claim:

> It does mean "fear of being perceived as homosexual".

It doesn’t mean that. It can refer to that, but that is not what homophobia means.

[emodendroket]

"Homophobia" also refers to more generally negative attitudes about homosexuality, not just the fear the name suggests.

[smnrchrds]

To add to this, -phobia suffix is used to express aversion, not just fear. For example, hydrophobicity.

[xyzzy21]

It's definitely an American thing.

The primary cause of hating disco in the 1970s was that it was gays, blacks and latinos who were associated with it. And that and corporatization of music by the very same boomers that's kept disco dead in the US since. And yet the REST of the world kept disco and reincarnated it into several genres of electronica.

So I wouldn't be surprised.