TEENAGE WASTELAND

Note To Amusement Park Employees: Don’t Write “Were Fags” On Customer Photos

On August 17, 2008 Craig Person and Edmund Yang went to the Great America amusement park and got on the Psycho Mouse ride where an automated camera took a down-angled shot of the two men holding hands. They declined to buy the picture of them after the ride, but when they encountered the same photo at another ride’s counter later in the day, they saw that some aspiring comic book artist had apparently added a thought bubble on the digital photo with the phrase “Were Fags!” The men were not amused; so unamused in fact, that they filed a lawsuit.

According to their lawyer Elisa Stewart, “They were very upset. Complaints were made early on, and at some point Great America became nonresponsive;” hence the three-year wait between the incident and the lawsuit.

But on the surface there are a few things wrong with this entire scenario:

1) The Great America amusement park should be ashamed for hiring teenagers with such poor punctuation skills. Yes, we know that the job mostly entails pushing buttons, cleaning puke, and selling photos, but leaving an apostrophe off of “We’re Fags!” turns it into “Were fags!” which some people could mistake for “Werefags,” a dangerous type of shape-shifting homo that can turn anyone into a fabulous midnight antiquer with just one Fresca-flavored bite.

2) We’re curious what these gents wanted from the park in the three-years before the lawsuit: an apology from the Photo Hut? All-you-can eat funnel cake? A season pass to Planet Snoopy? Every amusement park owner knows you gotta give your angry customers a manager that they can bitch at or else the dullards answering your phones will just make the customers more angry by giving them the runaround for the next three years. Heck, the dumb person who defaced the photo has probably already been fired for smoking weed behind the KidZville shake shack.

3) The Psycho Mouse is listed as a “family coaster.” That is, it’s a ride for bed-wetters and moms with vertigo. Next time get on the Drop Tower Scream Zone. Everyone looks like a skull-crushing badass when they get their picture taken on that ride.

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