People are forgetting how prevalent homosexual hatred used to be

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was alive in the 80s and 90s and from my memory talking to a large number of adults from all walks of life basically everyone was what you’d call homophobic or hateful, the really out there radical left wing whacko position was leave them alone they aren’t hurting anyone, which was a rare position. Most believed it was vaguely wrong. If you ran in radical gay activist circles in NYC maybe things were different, certainly wasn’t in the mainstream. Most people were not frothing maniacs, just slightly negative.
I think part of the problem is that to the lay person who wasn’t there they use media to form their opinions on the past, and take the comparative lack of mention of it to say hey it didn’t really exist. Thing was media tended to shy away from the issue, hell Star Trek refused to produce a gay plot line in the late eighties.

I don’t know why I find this of import, but to find someone even close to a modern conception of someone not homophobic you’d have probably had to interview a couple hundred people.

2

I was in college in the early 1970’s, in Berkeley, Ca. Granted, this was a quite liberal community, and is near San Francisco, which was already established as a gay mecca.

I lived in a co-op, which is a communal sort of living arrangement (all-male in this case, which actually meant mostly-male), privately run, NOT an on-campus dorm. There were several out gays there, and they weren’t particularly secretive about it. There were probably others who were more secretive.

What you called “the really out there radical left wing whacko position was leave them alone they aren’t hurting anyone, which was a rare position”, I think was partly correct:

The common attitude was, I thought, leave them alone they aren’t hurting anyone, as you say.

But I don’t think there was anything radical, whacko, or particularly overly left-wing or rare about it. It seemed to me that this was, rather, the common and prevailing attitude. Well, at least in some circles, I guess, at least in the student community there as best as I could see it.

In those days, even though there were a lot of gays in S.F., there were still frequent gay-bashing bar raids by the police in S.F. – when, in those days, “gay bashing” was meant literally, with police raiding bars, night-sticks a-flailing, skulls a-cracking. So tolerance of gays wasn’t quite well-established, even in San Francisco.

3

Left wing whacko was a bit of sarcasm obviously, bit like how if you asked 100 people how to deal with corporate corruption you’d probably get one or two advocating a return to hunting and gathering.:stuck_out_tongue: I guess what I was trying to get across was the view of average person then would probably be downright shocking now, and we’re talking only a few decades.

You see this in history discussions all the time, what once was a very progressive and liberal view is now something that wouldn’t even gain traction on Stormfront etc.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with atheism, look up what Bush 1 thought of atheists, I’ve heard others older tell me the same thing happened with racism, that it would be hard for people now to even wrap their heads around how bad it used to be.

4

I’ve heard it said that at lot of progress that had been made in terms of gay acceptance actually dropped backward considerably as AIDS awareness/paranoia came about in the 80s.

I came of age in the 80s, graduated from highschool in the early 90s. I’d be interested in hearing from someone old enough to have fully experienced the 70s and the 80s (or better yet, 60s through 80s).

How did gay acceptance from society at large in 1977 compare with 1987?

5

If you want to know how white, liberal, upper-middle-class men felt about homosexuals in the 1970s, you could do worse than reading some back issues of Playboy magazine. Especially the jokes and cartoons.
Remember, these were folks who thought they were leading the Sexual Revolution, but were actually just reinforcing heteronormative behaviour (and celebrating the patriarchy, but that’s a subject for a different dissertation).

6

It’s still not established here in Fort Worth, for that matter. The Rainbow Lounge Raid wasn’t as bad as some past raids, but it happened in 2009. That’s right, it happened in this millennium, within the past four years. That’s scary and depressing.

7

When I was a teenager (mid-70s), being called a faggot was one of the worst insults imaginable. Some friends and I were discussing the idea of homosexuality, and we came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t so evil after all. When I mentioned that to my parents, they were shocked and disappointed in me.

Today, they are totally oool with the idea.

8

In my small Midwestern town, there were some openly gay males (but no out lesbians, but I won’t go into why that might have been so). One of my friends moved out of his parents house with thier blessing at age 17 to live with an openly gay adult man for his last two years of shcool, and everybody was cool iwth it (smirking yes, but violence or trashing his locker? not at all).

I had a similar experience as Eirc on That 70’s Show when I was out in the country in a car with a gay kid, smoking dope. The TV kid made a pass at Eirc and his friends bagged on him later; IRL, we just smoked dope and nobody said shit.

This was during the Glam era, so we had Elton John and Bowie, and Billy Christal on Soap. As ahold-over from the 60’s, it was fun to be on the progressive side of issues like racism and homophobia, laughing at the squares.

AIDs really changed things. The squares, who’d seen Soap as evidence of the decline of Western Civilization, were vindicated. "“Of course homosexuality is bad - it’s finaly become lethal.” To which the only response was “That’s the stupidest thing anyone could believe.”

It really polarized the issue.

On a tangent issue, I don’t see low-level homophobia among young straight males as ever being totally wiped out. Young guys have to actively transition from boyhood to manhood, and while girls are accepted as women the day they flow their reproductive fluids into a cotton receptacle, boys have to put theirs into a woman to make it to the next level. Suicide rates of teeneage boys post-break-up is higher than for girls, because of the sense of failure.

Manhood is about “doing,” not just being. And boys who have sex with other boys are seen as taking the easy way out. I don’k think that’s true: gay kids have just as much heartache and rejection from their gender of preference, of course. And gay is no longer immediatley linked to feminitiy; not is feminitity linked to weakness: Enough gay muscle studs and enough women entering into tratiitional male jobs changed that. But until every day is Sadie Hawkins Day, “getting the girl” will be the name of the game, and gay kids wiill be perceived as staying on the bench.

9

I’m going to disagree with this. A young female is considered no longer a girl upon menarche. However, she’s not really considered to be a woman until she’s had sex. With a male.

10

Back in the late sixties, it was an insult.

By the 70s, when I was in college, that had faded. When we took a course on Sex and Sexuality, they invited people from a neighboring college’s Gay/Lesbian group to address the class. It was fairly crowded; people were curious. There was a certain amount of mocking afterwards, but nothing particularly cruel.

At the same time, the National Lampoon was using homosexuality as the punchline for a lot of their jokes, making it seem more humorous than anything else.

11

Only only a real, proper woman when she has suffered the pain of childbirth.

12

I first became exposed to openly gay people in college in the early seventies. In fact, one of my roommates came out several years after graduation. All of which helped me to transition to taking it in stride, an experience undoubtedly shared by many others who passed through the college scene in that time period. We realized that, like in so many other ways, society’s norms up to that point had simply been wrong.

13

Most of the characters’ blasé reaction to Thomas’ open homosexuality was one thing about “Downton Abbey” that irritated me. Revisionist history is so much less compelling than an honest one, iMO.

14

I graduated high school in 1989 and decided to attend my mother’s alma mater - a public woman’s university. When my choice was known, I was taken aside half a dozen times by different classmates classmates, people who’d never bothered to speak to me before, to tell me to reconsider, because a woman’s university would have lesbians. :rolleyes:

Even though I found that attitude exasperating, it never occurred to me to point out that there are lesbians at pretty much every university, that lesbians don’t roam in packs, pulling down tender freshman, or that statistically straight men were statistically far more dangerous to me than gay women. It was just an assumed, nebulous evil to be avoided.

My first year in college, one of my best friends from high school came out to me, and I got to confront my own prejudices pretty thoroughly. Knowing a real human being who deserved happiness and love more than 90% of the other humans on this planet made it much easier to change my attitudes. I went into IT after college, and I remember a lot of the men having kneejerk homophobic attitudes. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that nerds had no cachet at the time. We were still dismissed and derided, and male nerds were considered unmasculine, abnormal, and incapable of socialization, so I think it was more a case of “look how gay I’m not!”

When I came back to IT after ten years of other stuff, I noticed that attitudes were much more relaxed, but I’m working with an older crowd of mostly married, mostly with kids, men, and nerds are no longer ostracized.

15

I remember attitudes in the 70s as being very much tied to age-groups. Children and adolescents were angry, contemptuously hostile, and often violent towards any male peers who were thought to be faggy; adults in their 30s and beyond were less overtly violent (usually) but also dismissively contemptuous and often angry and hostile as well. But college-age young adults were much more likely to be accepting; gay rights wasn’t an unheard-of phrase. I’d say by the end of the 70s if you were in college at least half of the students I ran into (University of New Mexico / Albuquerque) would hint and joke about someone being gay but without the hostility; if anything there was some pressure to come out, as in “everyone knows, and it’s cool, dude, we’re OK with it”.

16

I was lucky in the 80s in that my parents were good friends with an gay couple, so my first exposure to the idea was just as another bunch of grown ups, and both have cheerfully told me about other gay friends they had earlier.

But despite that, I still remember having an argument with my mother over gay couples being allowed to adopt, with her saying that they should only be able to adopt severely disabled children, who had no chance of a normal life anyway. At the time, that was considered pretty open minded.

In the late 90s even, a gay friend -at the local boys school- was harassed pretty seriously by classmates and teachers, and no-one was even slightly surprised. He was a nice guy, plenty of people liked him, but harassment from some people was just seen as the logical consequence of his being gay; unfortunate, but that’s just the way it was.

17

Making the rounds as a Morgan Freeman twitter quote (not true, as per Snopes) is a comment that is still funny and appropriate, regardless of who originally wrote it:
**
‘I hate the word homophobia. It’s not a phobia. You are not scared; you are an asshole.’**

18

I grew up in the '60s and '70s and in my mostly Catholic corner of a formerly Puritan state, I can’t say I was much aware of gayness and the word would have more than likely “queer” in that time or place. In junior high in the early '70s when I first heard on classmate ask another if he was “gay,” I didn’t really know what that meant.

In high school there was a younger male student in the music program who was very flamboyant, flashy and showy–just like Liberace–and I didn’t particularly care for him as a person, but I never actually thought of him as being homosexual. (Twenty years later he died of AIDS.) I didn’t think of Liberace being gay, for that matter.

In the '80s, when AIDS first hit the news, was the time that coincided with my awareness of the gay population as a relatively large segment of society. I had gay friends, male and female. I went with some of them to an exhibit of Mapplethorpe photos when it came to Boston. We made Christmas tree ornaments that looked like little Keith Haring people for somebody’s apartment.

None of those people I knew talked much about experiencing hate from people. All of them were hesitant at first about coming out to their families and other friends, though. Mostly since many of them had been raised in very traditional Catholic homes. Hell, even STRAIGHT sex was frowned upon unless you were making a baby.

But we were in Massachusetts. Gays can legally marry here now, so maybe that’s why is never seemed like a really big issue except for a little stupid high school locker room teasing.

19

I remember in college, during the late '70s, someone hit upon the idea of holding “Blue Jean Day” to increase awareness/support of gay issues. Everyone who was either gay or supportive of gays was to wear denim on that day.

You never saw so much corduroy in your life.

20

That sounds more like George Takei.