The summer before my senior year of high school, I worked on a ride at a huge amusement park. There were plenty of bad aspects to this job, but the absolute worst was the day in, day out interactions with the customers.
One day, I was working to help people get secured in the ride when I saw a guy wearing a ‘No Fear’ hat. Except this wasn’t a normal ‘No Fear’ hat, because he had removed the ‘F’ and replaced it with ‘Qu’, and at the end, added an ‘s’. Yeah, real classy.
“You know,” I said to him, “Queer is spelled q-u-e-e-r, not q-u-e-a-r.”
He looked at me, dip running down his chin and dripping onto his tank top. “That’s something only a queer would know,” he snarled at me.
“Queers, and people with a fifth-grade education,” I replied.
What was his response? Let’s just say I’m glad he was already strapped into the ride.
