Over the last few decades, there has been quite a change in how people view homosexuality. Part of that is demographics; old people are more likely to oppose homosexuality than young people and old people have a higher death rate than young people.
Does that explain all or most of the shift though?
If it doesn’t, how do people’s views of homosexuality change?
If someone would like to offer how their view changed, that’d be great. It’d be particularly useful to start from the original view and then see the steps the person went through.
If someone has some insight into how others they know changed their views, please share that as well.
If someone talks about how their opinion changed, please don’t attack them for the views they used to hold, the point is that they improved themselves.
I think a significant part of it came about through hard work and activism by people who used the law to force institutions to accept open gays. Once there, people interacting with openly gay people found out it wasn’t that big of a deal and there wasn’t anything to be scared of.
In my case, I don’t know if you could describe my views as changed, but I literally wasn’t aware that anyone even wanted gay marriage until the late 90s (but immediately was fine with it once it was brought to my attention).
So if there are other people in that same situation and as far as they know there are only a few people, they might think that tradition trumps the rights of just a handful of people. Whereas that might not be the case if there are hundreds of thousands of people affected. From a strictly utilitarian point of view that might be true, if the idea is so offensive as to cause millions of bigots severe psychological stress versus the rights of only a few people to marry.
Of course when it comes to equal rights I am not a utilitarian.
I’m not sure I ever really disliked homosexuals. “Homosexuality is wrong, mmkay?” was about the extent of my upbringing. When I finally met a gay guy when I transferred high schools he was… unremarkable. I mean I couldn’t discern any reason that aspect of him affected anything else. Around the same time a Hawaiian court ruled that the state couldn’t discriminate against a person based on the gender of their desired spouse, and I thought that was solid reasoning.
I guess it was a gradual, “what do I care?” kind of thing.
As for populations in general, there’s been a normalization going on for at least 20-30 years with LGBetc, along with a generational understanding that we aren’t affected by the personal choices of others.
I don’t think I was ever a true homophobe, but I know my views have softened over the decades. I think a huge part of that was living and working in a community with a large gay and lesbian population. They weren’t some abstract concept, they were real people that I interacted with every day.
My framework for “knowing” that homosexuality was wrong was entirely based on fundamentalist Christian teachings.
I left the faith for other reasons when I reached adolescence, but there was never a logical reason behind the moral ban on homosexuality - only “God says so” and “it’s not a natural behavior” (which was subsequently proven to be false anyways), and there were similar proscriptions against everything from wearing padded bras (false advertising and promiscuous to boot) to associating with Shriners (secret Satanists, you’d get demons if you hung around them) to the salvation status of other brands of Christianity (Catholics, Mormons, Adventists - all going straight to hell) … so really there was no point retaining that one particular teaching when I dropped everything else as a falsehood.
Once I actually met real people with different life situations, I rather quickly learned that morality is a little bit more complex than basing it entirely upon which religious or sexual preference or gender-identifying box my former faith assigned people to. I also found that I was enough of a romantic to be happy for people when they found someone they were compatible with, regardless of their respective physical equipment. I further determined that I really didn’t actually give a shit who was having what with whom, as I had enough of my own troubles, and I figured they were all big boys and girls and could work out their own lives without me weighing in.
That said, my mother remains a staunch Christian, and while she still believes that my gay friends are going straight to hell (along with my atheist and Buddhist friends) she has moved from fear and active distrust to sorrow at their plight, and since she has become acquainted with them, has always been genuinely interested in their lives and their happiness (which I hope, but have no proof, is separate from her interest in the status of their souls).
I have never directly asked her, but from her actions and comments at other times, I believe that her opinion has modified over time to allow that people do not *choose *to be gay, but she still believes that their only option to remain godly is to be celibate - in other words, she doesn’t feel that it’s wrong to BE a gay person, only to ACT gay.
It seems to be a compromise she can live with, but it frankly boggles my mind.
I’d agree with Dewey Finn. My dad’s a bit of a homophobe, but he got a lot more accepting when he found out that a guy he knew and respected was gay. Knowing any minority person makes that minority-group a “person” rather than a scary “them”.
When the majority of straight people personally knew somebody who was homosexual, then the idea of homosexuality became less scary. It is relatively easy to demonize a group of people as ‘the other’ but more difficult to apply that kind of discrimination against someone you personally know. This has become especially true in the recent five years as more brave people have disclosed their gender preferences to the amazement of their straight friends. The fact that civilization has continued to trundle right along with nary a rain of blood or a hail of fire in sight has also diminished many people’s concerns about the issue. After all, when you are worried about making your mortgage payment or when (and whether) your loved one is returning from an overseas war, certain other concerns fade into the background.
Summary: when straight people realized that gay people were people just like them, the fear of ‘the other’ started to fade. Hopefully, this trend will continue. Life is too short to spend any time hating people for being different than you.
I think a lot of people didn’t really think gays existed, outside of Hollywood and hair salons, that is.
Lenny Bruce had a couple of bits about how old people and middle America just didn’t see obvious gays. That was from about 1960. The average person might have wondered about someone, but that someone was no doubt so closeted that he dated and never did anything too gay. And it was in bad taste to bring it up.
But when people started being open you thought about specific nice people, not Liberace. And my daughters’ generation grew up with people being openly gay, and for us at least never learned the prejudice.
I agree with this, too. I think this is the way people’s opinions of a “group” change, namely, when they get to know individual members of the group and see that these individuals don’t fit the group label/stereotype. This applies to people of different races, nationalities, religions, even age groups (i.e., “all old people” or “all teenagers”).
I’ll bite. I’ve wanted to tell this story for some time, actually, so thanks for the thread.
I grew up in the South, in a culture (actually a couple of cultures) not too happy about homosexuality. However, I read a lot of books. I can still pinpoint the Mercedes Lackey Arrows books (I know, I know, don’t judge me!) as the ones that had queer characters and all the other characters were fine with that, and it blew my tiny little mind. I read a lot of other stuff, too, but that was the book that started it. So by the time I was a teenager I was totally OK with it (which turns out to have been a good thing, as I had a roommate who was bi at the time).
But gay marriage? Not really interested, although I freely confess I wasn’t really interested in straight marriage either. Give 'em all civil unions and let them sort it out. (This is, honestly, still the underpinnings of my views, although I recognize it is unworkable.) But then two things happened.
I got married. I didn’t even want to get legally married, but I had to in order to get the religious marriage, which was required to have sex. But anyway, even though I didn’t want the legal marriage, it turned out to be kind of nice – for the first time I started realizing why people might want to get married legally.
Let me tell you about Rose. I looked up to her enormously in grade school because she was extremely popular, a natural leader, and the kind of person who stood up for the right thing and didn’t let peer pressure tell her otherwise. I am aware of at least two instances where she stopped bullying simply by talking a stand and saying, look, this isn’t cool. Stop it. Other kids, myself included, were too oblivious, too cowed, too willing to go along with the status quo, or too nervous about their social standing to say anything, but never Rose. I am firmly convinced that the relative lack of bullying at my school, and the relative niceness of everyone (don’t get me wrong, middle school was still awful, but it could definitely have been a lot worse), had a great deal to do with Rose and how she set the tone for the class.
Anyhow, you see where this is going. My mom told me that Rose had gotten married to another woman. And when she told me that, I thought, you know what? A woman like Rose – she should be allowed to get married to whomever she wants. It doesn’t matter whether I think marriage is a stupid idea in general or what – Rose should be able to do what she wants.
And now I’m totally a proponent of gay marriage.
(I’d known and been friends with a number of gay people before that, but they were all single. It’s possible my views might have changed had any of them actually gotten married and talked to me about how it was important to them. Of course, seeing as how I was going around saying that I didn’t think anyone should get married ever, they probably wouldn’t have talked to me about it, so there’s that.)
Anecdote time: A friend in his 70’s once remarked to me “I don’t like gays because of what they do.” I responded “What do they do that you don’t like? Go to work? Pay taxes? Watch TV? Brush their teeth?” yada, yada, yada, I went on for about five minutes, then asked “How would you like to be judged by something you do maybe an hour every week?”
He responded “An hour if I’m lucky.”
He later told me that he’d made a 180 degree turn around on his opinion based on my tirade.
ETA: I guess people’s opinions change when they realize that honomsexuals are mostly just like you and me.
Seriously, I grew up in a small town in rural Ohio where I did not know a single gay person. (Well, it turns out later that I actually did, but they were all closeted at the time.) That plus a religious upbringing led me to think that being gay was icky and wrong and should probably be shunned.
Then the first week I was at college, I met a gay person. He was like…just a person. Ordinary dude.
Mostly echoing the above. Efforts to ‘humanize’ gays really helped. I never hated homosexuals, but I thought they were deviant and wrong - this is probably through high school. Then I had a few talks with more ‘enlightened’ friends and there were way more positive stories on homosexuals on TV and I realized that I really had no good reason to find them wrong or deviant. They’re just folks.
Exactly this. All throughout high school, I’m not sure if I’d have been considered homophobic, but I did join in with the use-homosexuality-as-a-derogatory-term crowd. The summer after my senior year, I got an acting gig, and one day I was driving a fellow actor back to his home. I casually made such a derogatory comment, and he looked at me in shock. “Matey!,” he said, “do you know how many people you work with that are gay?”
And the thing is, I didn’t. And that’s what changed it all for me. They’re just -people-, they’re not -warlocks-. People I interacted with every day. It really changed my view, that little insight.
(Also, that particular actor, through similar insights, became my best friend for about a decade.)
I was asked to take a stand. And in taking the stand (which was funding and supporting a gay lesbian film festival) I had to decide whether I was so afraid of being identified as a lesbian that I would refuse to support the best proposal for a film series that had come across my desk ever. I had no good reason not to support the proposal other than my own homophobia. And the answer was no, i couldnt turn down a great opportunity for my organization because i was afraid someone might think i was a dyke, or because i thought gay sex was icky. Once I came to grips with that, the rest fell into place