Where we sat at lunch

[substitute]

What were the cliques at your high school or equivalent (ages 14 to 18)?

Clarification: This isn't a request for your particular affiliation or lack thereof; there's loads of quizzes and "memes" where you can relive that for good or for ill. I'm fishing for descriptions of the social groups from your teen years as you observed them, whether from the inside or the outside. It's a survey of environments: what were the groups you saw? If you weren't at anything like a school with social groups then, none of this really matters.

I went to an almost entirely white public school in a Southern California beach resort town from 1979 to 1983. Think Fast Times at Ridgemont High. So, mine were, in roughly hierarchical order:

Preppy/"Sosh" (rich pretty kids or those who could pass for rich, anyway): pink and green clothing, lots of chinos and khaki, cashmere sweater knotted around the neck, penny loafers.

Jock/Cheerleader (sports and beauty competition winners in the classic American vein)

Surfer (specific to my locale; not quite the same as jock: they were too obsessive about surfing to participate in much of anything else or deal with the hierarchy at all)

"Band-O": marching band members as obsessive social phenomenon

Theater club: actors singers dancers and technical theater types and wannabees

Pop Music Lifestyle Subculture: at the time this meant rockabilly revival kids, metalheads, and some of the new wave stuff.

Mods and Punks: this was the early 1980s, so a Mod Ska/The Jam flavored revival was going on, and punk was a seriously transgressive style that set you apart. the two groups were pretty interchangeable because they were scarier than the other pop music identities. The mods were always high on black beauties and the punks burned things and put safety pins in their noses.

Academic/geek/nerd. You know the drill. The straight A's crowd plus anyone who liked computers or Dungeons & Dragons and science fiction.

Stoner

Total outsider of some kind (doomed).

I'm interested for a few reasons. Subculture identities are multiplying, for one thing, and most of the pop music-related ones that have appeared in the last 20 years became permanent options on a kind of menu. And high school has a huge presence in American life. Some people spend their whole lives rebelling against the slights they got in their teens. Others don't ever move beyond the subculture they found then. If you know what clique an American middle-class person claimed at age 16, you know a lot about them right away.

Comments

[brianenigma.livejournal.com]

In my high school at the time (88-92, Huntington Beach), it was much the same but with a few differences. Preppies dressed a bit differently, the jock and surfer archetypes were certainly there exactly as you describe. There was a lot of crossover between band and theater and there were at least two bands (marching and jazz) that did not always see eye-to-eye (jazz band was also the theater orchestra.) There wasn't a whole lot of music-based subculture. It was a little too late for Metal to be taken all that seriously. While there was a greater Grunge subculture in the world at the time and lots of students were in to it, it was not well represented as a specific group of people at school. There were maybe one or two kids that I'd really describe as Punk, and like true punks, they were just doing their own thing; fuck the rest of you. There were a couple of different classes of Goth-like groups (although me being part of the Goth culture may be skewing my memory toward it's nuances and a lesser knowledge of the other cliques.) There was a sort of "happy goth" group--not entirely goth, but with a big heapin' helpin' of 80's alternative, and not entirely conformant to the Goth "dress code." I think this group morphed into candy-ravers in later years. Then there were the regular Goths--certainly dressed the part, were very into the music, some recreational drug use, etc. There were also some more hard-core Goths that were more into hardcore drug. There was a separate stoner group (pot smokers) and a group that was into harder stuff (some crossover into the hardcore Goths) that most people shunned. There was a specific group of people from various cliques (goths, stoners, etc.) that would hang out/hide out behind the "temporary" trailer classrooms behind the school (those "temporary" trailers, I believe, are still there and still used for teaching health and driver's education.) They were the (cigarette) smokers. In the Academic realm, there were really two distinct groups. The one I guess you'd call the College-Prep Academic. They were slightly preppy in their own way, but didn't really have the time or inclination for D&D or computers, maybe Chess Club or Math Club, because they could put that on their college application. They were all about getting into the MIT and Harvard and the like, directly without having to bother with a 2-year community college, preferably with a scholarship. The rest of the academics were the D&D, comic, sci-fi, and computer nerds (these were most of my best friends.)

[handstil.livejournal.com]

You went to Edison, right?
Do you remember "Viola"? She was my favorite goth at Edison!

[brianenigma.livejournal.com]

Nope, I went to Marina.