I'm not sure I was ever (and still not) a part of geek/nerd culture. Sci-fi, anime, comics, superheroes... I've never liked any of them. Okay, so I
did love the Madballs comic books back when Madballs were huge, but those weren't even close to the standard fare. They were disgusting, and to this day, I'm drawn toward the macabre and the hideous.
From an early age, I was into games and computers. My mom had me two months after she turned 18, so we've always been more like best friends than parent/child. She used to take me with her to the arcades several times a week from about '81 to '83 (when my mom was between 22 and 24 years old). However, at that time, the arcades were where the cool kids hung out. Their shift in reputation from "the place to be seen" to "geeky-kid haven" didn't occur until the mid-to-late '80s.
Mom and I had an Atari 2600 at home and we played the shit out of it. She used to kick my ass at Pitfall, and I still "congratulate" her in a snarky fashion for her prowess in defeating a five-year-old.
The Atari wasn't exactly geeky though - that reputation was almost exclusively reserved for the Commodore, which I never had.
Strangely, in second and fourth grade (I skipped first and third) I was the outcast for not liking sci-fi, Doctor Who in particular. I was put into a school for gifted kids after the public school system told my parents that they had nothing for me (actually, it was more like the public schools begged my parents to take me off their hands immediately after I finished kindergarten). At the gifted school, the kids were more into reading and sci-fi than they were into physical activity. Recess was a bore for me because almost all of my classmates were "playing" Doctor Who in the same way that other children play house. My main interest was music, which at the time meant New Wave. That wasn't exactly popular with my classmates, leaving me with almost nothing in common with them. As a result, second grade was the year that I read
Moby Dick and
The Count of Monte Cristo, reading them exclusively during the year's daily recesses. Not at home and not on weekends - only one hour each day, five days a week, for nine months.
Those kids also lost respect for me when I regularly kicked their asses in fencing.
What can I say? We lefties often have a huge advantage in swordplay!
My dad pulled me out of the gifted school after the first half of fourth grade, but even at my new school, I failed to fit in anywhere. Two years of little-to-no interaction with peers took their toll on my social development (though the severe beatings and daily child abuse from my stepmother didn't help either). If it weren't for my stepmother's rule that I wasn't allowed to have friends or interact with anyone my age, I might not have been the awkward quiet kid who eventually became the target of every bully in my class. However, that bullying resulted in my forming bonds with the other outcast kids. They were the kids who owned Commodores, played D&D, and talked about comics. The geeky kids! And though I didn't own a Commodore, never played (or had an interest in) D&D, and didn't like comics or sci-fi, the fact remains that they never shunned me and I felt a kinship with them. They were bullied for being geeks, and I was bullied by association.
I should probably also state, for the record, that I kept befriending the geeky kids at every school I went to after the gifted one. By "every school" I mean the school I went to for the last half of fourth grade and for fifth grade [footnote]I was literally kicked out of this school because I was bullied so often that the administration said they couldn't continue punishing every kid in my class - at this school, I literally had no friends. I suffered bloody noses from my classmates, a cut on the back of my head that needed stitches, bruises all over my body, getting locked in the classroom closets, and was once even held down and thrown out of the classroom window before class started[/footnote]; the school that I then went to for half of my second fifth grade year [footnote]I chose to do fifth grade twice because I was the age of a third-grader while my fifth-grade classmates were entering puberty. The bullying I suffered was in part because I was over a head shorter than almost everyone in my class[/footnote]; another school I went to for the end of fifth (part 2) and all of sixth; my first year of junior high at yet another school; my second year of junior high somewhere else (I switched districts after mom got custody of me) and then, finally, all four years of high school in one place.
Though I couldn't tell you from personal experience what "geek culture" was like back in those days, I DO know that my "nerd" friends were picked on mercilessly because of their interests, and even more so because of their almost-universal lack of interest in sports. I was picked on just as often as they were due to my association and friendships with them. However, by eighth grade, I did finally have something in common with the geeky kids who I gravitated toward: an interest in computers and computer games. We'd trade games all the time as well as tips on how to navigate MS-DOS, and we could talk for hours about sound and video cards. I admit, I was jealous of my friends who had EGA graphics and/or Soundblaster (or Tandy) cards in their computers. Ah, those were the days!
During the break between 10th and 11th grades, I went all-out goth, and though I ran around with a different crowd after that, our friend pool overlapped significantly with the geeks seeing as we were all fellow outcasts. Some (but by no means all) of the bullying I suffered stopped after I began eating lunch with the black-wearing, guitar-toting, punk/goth kids, but I do know that it never let up for the geeks. They remained easy targets because they continued sitting at the lunchroom tables playing cards or D&D, whereas I moved to the back hallways on cold days, or the hill outside the school when it was warm. Jocks often picked on the geeks and, just as often, got away with it because the culture of the school was sports-oriented. Sometimes the geeks would get suspended after they got beaten up, with the administration concocting some bullshit reason why it wasn't the jock's fault.
That exact scenario happened to me once during my goth years. One day, I got repeatedly punched after I leaned over in my desk to get a book out of my backpack. Because I was leaned over, I never saw the attack coming. I also didn't see it coming because my cowardly attacker came up on me from behind. The guy (yes, GUY!!!) who attacked me, completely unprovoked, was a member of the football team. He was wearing his jersey that day as all jocks did on the day of, or before, a game. He beat me up on the day before the Thanksgiving weekend, and if the administration suspended him, he wouldn't have been able to play in the big Thanksgiving weekend game against our school's main rivals. The jock and I stood in the office of one of the school's deans, me with a bruised face and bloody lip (dressed all punk that day) and him with bruised knuckles, wearing his football jersey. I stood in horror when I got suspended because I "must have said something to provoke him." Those were that *****'s exact words.
My geek friends had to put up with the exact same thing happening to them repeatedly, as did my goth/punk friends.
So that's a small window into how nerd/geek culture fared during my preteen and teenage years, roughly between '88 and '95. I graduated high school in '95, and that was the last time I saw extreme victimization of that culture. I ran with the same type of crowd during my first year of college and we never experienced violence or nastiness of any sort.
There's one last thing I should mention that might be of significant importance when you consider my story of how we were treated. My high school?
Columbine. Yes, THE Columbine High School that became the site of the nation's worst school shooting in '99, four years after I graduated. Sure enough, the shooters were two outcast kids whose goal on that day was to kill as many jocks as possible. Nothing in the world excuses their disgusting actions, but I'm pretty sure that the catalyst of their hatred was that they suffered the same mistreatment from the jocks and the school administration as my high school friends and I did. So while the talking heads on TV were blaming Marilyn Manson, The Matrix, and video games, I sat back and seethed about how fingers were being pointed everywhere except for the upper-middle-class bullies, their parents who did nothing to stop them, and the complicit upper-middle-class school administration who worked tirelessly to further persecute the persecuted.
So yeah... my experience of how geeks were treated might be somewhat more brutal than what others went through.
