# People are forgetting how prevalent homosexual hatred used to be **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 14, 2013, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903 "2013-03-14T08:16:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Dallas\_Jones](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dallas_jones/32/3277_2.png) [@Dallas\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dallas_Jones)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/21 "2013-03-14T18:38:34Z")
There weren’t any gay people in the '70s. Liberace wasn’t gay, Elton John wasn’t yet openly gay. Both were just flamboyant showmen. Even the word ‘gay’ wasn’t used until later. If you had asked me while I was in high school what ‘gay’ meant, I would have said _happy_. These mythical people were either queers or homos. (sorry about the hate speech, that’s the way it was.) There were gay people somewhere, in theory, but not in real life that you actually knew in Smalltown, USA. My best friend from first grade through graduation from high school is a gay man. Looking back now it is obvious that he always has been. But if any suggestion had been made that he was ‘light in the loafers’ while we were growing up would have been the highest insult to him and any actual behavior or coming out of the closet statements would have meant ostracization from every one, probably even me. And not only that, any accusation would have hurt his feelings as a man. So he dated and married a woman and had a miserable experience and a couple of fine kids and sometime in the early '90s he was able to be happy about who he is, and always has been. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/22 "2013-03-14T20:04:15Z")
> [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > There weren’t any gay people in the '70s. Liberace wasn’t gay, Elton John wasn’t yet openly gay. Both were just flamboyant showmen. Even the word ‘gay’ wasn’t used until later. If you had asked me while I was in high school what ‘gay’ meant, I would have said _happy_. Gay was definitely used in the 70s. What years did _One Day at a Time_ run? I remember an episode where a guest character self-identified as gay. And my mother predicted the line, and used that word, and I, as a young teenager, knew what it meant. So probably before 1977 anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Infovore](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/infovore/32/420_2.png) [@Infovore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Infovore)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/23 "2013-03-14T22:25:34Z")
I went to grade school through high school in the '70s through early '80s. Mostly I don’t remember people talking about it. When they did, it was more of a thing to joke about than anything. My junior-high boyfriend later turned out to be gay (I didn’t find out until many years later, but some of the signs were there looking back) but if anybody noticed, I don’t recall them bothering him or harassing him in any way. We had another boy who was accused of being gay and I think it caused him quite a bit of emotional turmoil at the time (we were acquaintances but I wasn’t a close friend so I heard all this as hearsay at the time). He ended up actually being gay (and I might add, grew up to be utterly gorgeous) so obviously at some point he came to terms with it. I was relatively oblivious to social things during high school but I never heard of anything resembling physical gay-bashing. The worst was accusing somebody of being gay. I’m pretty sure at least some subset of my schoolmates thought _I_ was gay, since I hung out with my best (female) friend all the time and neither of us had boyfriends (the one I mentioned above was in junior high and was 100% platonic–we never even kissed. I wasn’t interested because I wasn’t into that sort of thing, and I think we were “safe” for each other). For reference, I grew up in a small California town full of artists, hippies and oak trees that had more rights than some of the citizens, so that might have had something to do with it. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![jz78817](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jz78817/32/1028_2.png) [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2013, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/24 "2013-03-14T23:06:26Z")
> [@DMark](#): > > 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.’\*\* but reading it in Morgan Freeman’s voice makes it even better. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/25 "2013-03-15T00:28:54Z")
> [@Infovore](#): > > I went to grade school through high school in the '70s through early '80s. Mostly I don’t remember people talking about it. When they did, it was more of a thing to joke about than anything. My junior-high boyfriend later turned out to be gay (I didn’t find out until many years later, but some of the signs were there looking back) but if anybody noticed, I don’t recall them bothering him or harassing him in any way. > > We had another boy who was accused of being gay and I think it caused him quite a bit of emotional turmoil at the time (we were acquaintances but I wasn’t a close friend so I heard all this as hearsay at the time). He ended up actually being gay (and I might add, grew up to be utterly gorgeous) so obviously at some point he came to terms with it. > > I was relatively oblivious to social things during high school but I never heard of anything resembling physical gay-bashing. The worst was accusing somebody of being gay. > > I’m pretty sure at least some subset of my schoolmates thought _I_ was gay, since I hung out with my best (female) friend all the time and neither of us had boyfriends (the one I mentioned above was in junior high and was 100% platonic–we never even kissed. I wasn’t interested because I wasn’t into that sort of thing, and I think we were “safe” for each other). > > For reference, I grew up in a small California town full of artists, hippies and oak trees that had more rights than some of the citizens, so that might have had something to do with it. 😃 Huh, my experience was very different. I was a teenager in Montreal in the 70s and gay-bashing was very prevalent at that time among my classmates. As someone else said, to be called a faggot was the ultimate insult. And there wasn’t just name-calling either – there was plenty of violence, of the kicking and shoving kind. Ironically, Montreal is now one of the most gay-friendly cities in North America. ---
**Author:** ![Hershele\_Ostropoler](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e47c2d/32.png) [@Hershele\_Ostropoler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hershele_Ostropoler)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/26 "2013-03-15T01:58:58Z")
I have read one or two books from the '60s on completely different topics that suddenly go into a page-long (give or take) homophobic screed as though it’s perfectly consonant. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/27 "2013-03-15T02:23:17Z")
“[Corrective rape](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_rape)” of lesbians is something else the cops used to be fond of. > [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > There weren’t any gay people in the '70s. Liberace wasn’t gay, Elton John wasn’t yet openly gay. Both were just flamboyant showmen. Even the word ‘gay’ wasn’t used until later. That usage of the word is [much older than that](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/517/how-did-gay-come-to-mean-homosexual). ---
**Author:** ![Battle\_Pope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Battle\_Pope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Battle_Pope)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/28 "2013-03-15T02:32:40Z")
I went to a conservative catholic school during the 80’s and getting called a faggot or queer was one of the few insults almost guaranteed to lead to punches being thrown. I remember one class where a few guys were openly talking about beating on another student they thought was gay and the teacher (a Brother) just listened calmly with no move to intervine. The same teacher had also been on a rant earlier in the class about how evil the US Navy was for naming an attack sub [City of Corpus Christi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_City_of_Corpus_Christi_(SSN-705)) :rolleyes: My mother was scandalised when Rock Hudson (one of her favorite actors) died of HIV and she refused to watch any of his films for some time. ---
**Author:** ![Dallas\_Jones](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dallas_jones/32/3277_2.png) [@Dallas\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dallas_Jones)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2013, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/29 "2013-03-15T05:18:09Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Quote: > Originally Posted by Dallas Jones View Post > There weren’t any gay people in the '70s. Liberace wasn’t gay, Elton John wasn’t yet openly gay. Both were just flamboyant showmen. Even the word ‘gay’ wasn’t used until later. > > > [@](#): > > > > That usage of the word is [much older than that](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/517/how-did-gay-come-to-mean-homosexual). I was exaggerating of course. I was not meaning this comment to be taken literally. ---
**Author:** ![Renifer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/71c47a/32.png) [@Renifer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renifer)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2013, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/30 "2013-03-17T02:27:38Z")
One book that espouses on the subject is Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr by Michael Starr. For those who don’t recognize the name, Burr was the actor who played Perry Mason, and he was also in Rear Window. The book describes how Hollywood execs tried to suppress the fact that Burr was gay by manufacturing relationships with actresses to protect his image. Some of those execs may have been trying to help him, in their own misguided ways (although the stronger motivation was to protect their cash cow.) As per personal experiences, my sister is gay. Most people wouldn’t necessarily think of it in a negative way, but it would have definitely marked her as “different.” Also, she frequently babysat for our neighborhood kids, whose father was an uncompromising Uber-Christian bastard. If he had found out, he would have been appalled that his kids had been under “that influence.” Most people in our hometown still don’t know of her orientation, and when she visits, she’s a bit uncomfortable about having to keep quiet about her love life. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2013, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/31 "2013-03-17T02:45:37Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > 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. At about the same time, I was just over the hill in Orinda, going to junior high school. All the cool kids (not me) were calling all the uncool kids (me, among others) gay, and nobody even knew what it meant. Just that it was a pretty bad thing to call somebody. ---
**Author:** ![Kenm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bc79bd/32.png) [@Kenm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kenm)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2013, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/32 "2013-03-17T03:38:56Z")
Cary Grant in drag, Bringing Up Baby, 1938. [**Because I just went _gay_ all of a sudden!**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A8U6aUPW48) The usage could not have been used unless it predated that movie by many years. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2013, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/33 "2013-03-17T11:10:37Z")
A frequent supposition is that that line in _Bringing Up Baby_ was a deliberate use of a term which was then little known, and thus it was an in-joke that could get by the censors: > **[Bringing Up Baby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing_Up_Baby)** > > Bringing Up Baby is a 1938 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. It was released by RKO Radio Pictures. The film tells the story of a paleontologist in a number of predicaments involving a scatterbrained heiress and a leopard named Baby. The screenplay was adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a short story by Wilde which originally appeared in Collier's Weekly magazine on April 10, 1937. > The script was written specif... ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2013, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/34 "2013-03-17T13:04:41Z")
“Gay” was commonly used in the gay community in the 1920s (which is probably when Grant learned it; a few lines later,he makes another gay in-joke about waiting for a bus on 42nd Street). To most people, it meant “cheerful” – until around 1970. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2013, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/35 "2013-03-18T14:11:31Z")
If homosexual hatred isn’t so prevalent today, why is there such hatred over the idea of gay marriage. You go talk to any group of abortion protestors about how much they support adoption, and then bring up _gay_ adoption. You’ll never see so many people do a 180 degree turn around on a subject. I’ve heard gay adoption referred to as “child abuse.” And if a lesbian gets pregnant by rape, she should have the baby and give it to a “real” family. Homosexual hatred is still alive and well. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2013, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/36 "2013-03-18T17:43:04Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > Manhood is about “doing,” not just being. This is correct, as we can see from the fact there is a “man card” but no corresponding “woman card”: Being a man is a status you can lose by being too interested in the wrong things, or not interested enough in the right things, or so on, whereas being a woman is not. ---
**Author:** ![HipGnosis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/76d3ee/32.png) [@HipGnosis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HipGnosis)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2013, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/37 "2013-03-18T18:05:19Z")
> [@grude](#): > > I was alive in the 80s and 90s… > 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. Dude - “lay people” there weren’t alive in the 90s are still kids. All their opinions are ill-formed and primarily based on social media. As for “People are forgetting how prevalent homosexual hatred used to be”… are you asking people to start hating again so others will remember it!!! Isn’t the ‘forgetting’ a sign of how better it is now?? I just don’t see your point, other than you wanting some external validation, from people that probably shouldn’t matter to you, which is kinda sad… ---
**Author:** ![Weirofhermiston](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e274bd/32.png) [@Weirofhermiston](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weirofhermiston)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2013, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/38 "2013-03-18T18:16:44Z")
It may be a peculiarly British aspect of the left but in the mid 70s when I was a student, the out there leftist position on gays was that it was a bourgeois deviation that come the revolution would simply cease to exist. That said, individual members of the out there left were always good supporters of our campaigns. I suspect they knew as well as we did that no matter how many copies of Socialist Worker they sold around campus, the revolution was not coming any time soon and our campaigns were a good deal less dour than theirs. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2013, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/39 "2013-03-18T21:49:47Z")
> [@Ethilrist](#): > > All the cool kids (not me) were calling all the uncool kids (me, among others) gay, and nobody even knew what it meant. Just that it was a pretty bad thing to call somebody. In elementary school, there was a recess game called “Smear the Queer”, in which the object was to tackle and swarm over the kid with the ball, until it could be wrestled away and the next kid would get tackled. I was practically in high school before I knew “queer” could mean something other than “the kid with the ball”. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2013, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903/40 "2013-03-19T11:38:20Z")
I’ll still maintian that AIDS was the great cultural watershed on the issue. Before 1981Newscasters had never had much reason to say “anal intercourse” into the living rooms of America. Homosexuality was understood to exisit, but its particulars weren’t. Outside of boys’ locker-rooms and barracks, dick-sucking, ass-licking and butt-fucking weren’t discussed; and among straights, “nice” girls had only recently started doing one of those three (I’ll let you guess which one). For the graphic details, everybody had to read Dr. David Reuben’s _Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask),_ which did include same-sex oral & anal, (I don’t recall if he covered rimming; perhaps too much for his target readership of Jewish mothers worried their sons might be fagellas) but along with tall things buttsex, implied that gay guys were just as likely to stick flashlights up their rectums as they would penises, and become the bane of the poor guy doing his residency on night shift at the ER. Or, spinning the wheel of fortune by connecting via phone numbers on restroom stalls, they’d eventually have an encounter with a demented freak who’d threaten to cut their cocks off. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/people-are-forgetting-how-prevalent-homosexual-hatred-used-to-be/652903.md?page=3)