Which is why we shouldn’t give homophobia an inch.
Even if it makes some of us laugh, @Miller
This is a good point. I’m in the Seattle area, which is really liberal.
Then again, my oldest daughter also grew up with a lot of acceptance, and she lives in North Carolina. And not an especially urban part of it.
I suspect that the script has flipped, where it used to be relatively small areas where you could be safe expressing yourself as anything but the old conservative cishet “normal”, now there are relatively small areas where you aren’t safe doing so. Granted, it should be safe everywhere, but it’s still progress.
Based on my interactions with my kids and their friends, sexual orientation isn’t a big deal even here in Wyoming, of all places (in the younger generations).
Sure, I just think terming anything in this conversation as “giving homophobia an inch” is more than a little absurd.
A student at my transgender child’s school threatened to shoot her under similar circumstances. And I also live in a liberal area.
And yet,
Fellow students aren’t the only potential threat to Q students or people in general.
The humor is not directed at gay behavior; it is at the absurdity that this was something believable to us as kids, the credulousness of so many, and the at the biases that have allowed the stories to ever have legs.
It is making fun of our former selves and those who are still as stupid and biased as we were then.
So yeah.
Yes, isolated incidents are an unfortunate possibility everywhere. And I’m aware of that killing, as it is a somewhat big story around here. I don’t think that people need to generally fear for their lives, but incidents like this certainly change that, at least temporarily.
And as others have said, this administration is openly hostile to anyone in that community, which just emboldens those kinds of actions. I do worry about a backslide, as @LSLGuy mentioned. I’m hoping that it doesn’t take root and cause a permanent backward shift in our attitudes toward tolerance. I, personally, suspect that we’re going to see the pendulum swing back in a big way soon-ish, though that just might be my optimism talking. People seem to be fed up with how things have been going in this country, and I am hoping it puts MAGA into irrelevence within a generation.
The murder of Juniper Blessing is horrific, but it does not appear to have been motivated by anti-trans bigotry. The attacker is currently being assessed to see if he’s mentally competent enough to stand trial. Blessing may not even have been his original target - there’s some reports he may have been stalking a different woman before switching targets when a more convenient one presented itself.
Mind, “It’s not transphobic, it’s just the sort of violence women have to deal with every day in this society!” isn’t much of an improvement.
I think it will, because most of the anti-LGBTQ+ bigots are older and will die off, and most young people are fine with whatever people want to identify as. (Note the weasel word “most.”)
I forgot about that aspect as well. Much of the MAGA crowd are people harkening for “simpler times” when “men were men and women were women, and men loved women”, that sort of antiquated bullshit. Younger generations are not growing up in such an environment and so will not have that feeling, and the older people who did are dying off.
Making little tee-hee schoolboy jokes about famous men sticking stuff up their butts etc. is definitely doing homophobia’s work for it. Nothing remotely absurd about it.
But you (pl.) somehow can’t do that without repeating the homophobic original bit. And so it lives for another generation.
I’d this still received wisdom? From what I can see on my daughter’s college campus, there has been a huge jump in reactionary shit from male students. Stuff that simply wouldn’t fly five years ago. This is a large state university. Has never been a bastion of liberalism, but still the change in campus climate has been pretty marked in the last two years.
Doesn’t help that the University is majority male. Maybe campuses that are gender balanced or majority female have a different climate. But it’s hard for me to believe that 18-24 year old males aren’t way more right wing than they were quite recently.
I was on campus when a similar shift happened in the early 80s. I’m disappointed but not at all surprised.
This. They figure they won’t get pushback like they used to. The rock was turned over ten years ago and even after it’s put back it’ll be a while before the vermin crawl back unter it.
No need to belabor but I see it as similar someone claiming that All in the Family encouraged bigotry by having Archie say bigoted things.
These rumors, including the Curtis one that triggered the discussion in this thread, have legs that have run ultramarathons. That is not due to the likes of us making fun of their absurdity and our own past idiocy, but because there are enough who are still big enough idiots to have them fit their prejudices. Conflating the latter with the former is not fighting their ignorance. Not that pointing and laughing at them here is so powerful, but it is not of harm at least.
And you somehow think that eliminating talk about an old urban legend is going to make the world better for gay people. It isn’t. There are far more things to worry about and try to change than policing people who make fun of others. And I say that as a gay man. I still find your argument to be absurd. And by the way, ask any kid if they know about this rumor. I guarantee you aren’t going to hear them say, “yes, I heard all about it on the SDMB.” Rather, they are going to look at you like you are weird.
You might be doing more damage by insisting it is a big deal, and thereby making it a bigger deal than it actually is.
No, it’s not “doing homophobia’s work for it,” and pretending that a bunch middle aged pro-LGBT farts reminiscing about the dumb bigotries they heard in their youth is somehow aiding and abetting homophobia is just fucking stupid.
Rod Stewart’s reputation may never recover.
Another key factor is how much of this BS women will accept from prospective male partners. I don’t have much (or any) contact with young women today, but I suspect that, at the very least, their resistance to reactionary sexual ideas is higher than that of men of the same age.
He is doing a good job of hurting his reputation on his own right now.