Forgive the clunky title, couldn’t quite put in any more succinctly. So you know how 200 years ago (nearly) everyone was racist, Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, but we don’t think of him as a monster because he was a product of his age. Whereas someone today who seriously advocates slavery and codified racism today is morally bankrupt, there was a point in history where one can no longer use the ‘product of the age’ defence.
Where do you think this point is in regards to codified homophobia (from denial of equal marriage to advocating punishments in law) - or have we even reached that point? Can someone be morally average in your view whilst still being a homophobe to the point of advocating laws based on it?
Question inspired by the recent posthumous pardoning of homosexual offences in the UK and the book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which has a fair smattering of homosexuality being described variously as perversion, deviance and the like - but the book was written in the '50s, so I think Shirer gets the ‘product of his age’ defence, while if the book were written and published in 2017 I don’t think that faces would be airborne.
If I can re-state your question it’s effectively “How far back can I go in the Wayback Machine and still be able to morally and ethically judge someone’s racist, sexist homophobic behavior?”.
Eh … not that far back. People keep forgetting that in the relatively recent past it was KNOWN as a scientific/cultural FACT that homosexuals were mentally defective and morally perverse, blacks were less evolved, child like and mentally deficient and women were (in general) not as smart or mentally steady as men. All these were known things.
You would have to be an intellectual rebel against known smart and influential people to believe otherwise and not everyone has those chops. If you’ve looking for the bright blue cultural line where we should have known better that’s going to vary considerably.
My father a State Department Project Director, was from the south and had a GI Bill doctorate from Cornell. He hated overt racists with a passion. I asked some question when I was 10 or so (I’m 57) about (American) black people having babies out of wedlock ( IIRC it was a topic in the news re war on poverty etc) and he responded that in general blacks were socially/culturally still a bit backwards and would catch up to whites eventually.
This was a man who devoted himself to helping black people (in Africa) live better lives and worked with them everyday. Where did the out of control racism begin and end here?
In the 60’s and 70’s he looked on gays with mild, eye rolling disdain and would get irritated when Liberace was camping it up on Ed Sullivan or Merv Griffin. He never spoke against people outside of these contexts. Where did the out of control homophobia begin and end here?
There was an ebb and flow of homophobia, depending on time an location. And even today, there are many people who consider themselves morally average who are homophobes.
Acceptance of homosexuality probably started in the 1970s, and has slowly advanced since then.
Hard question - my wild stab is around when “Three’s Company” came on TV.
I will point out that, given how recent this shift probably was, we have to account for the age of the homophobe in question. My dear sweet cousin didn’t fully come out of the closet until his dear sweet mom, my aunt, sank into dementia a few years ago. He’s well over 50. His mom is 87. In my book, she gets a “product of her time” pass - which, in my book, is only a partial pass anyway.
If we use racism as a guide, the transition between
Blacks should be slaves
Blacks shouldn’t be slaves but they aren’t as good as whites
Blacks are as good as whiltes but I wouldn’t let my daugther marry one.
Blacks and whites are totally equal in all ways.
Black culture is in and of itself valuable.
All occured as different times.
For Homosexuality the cut off dates for where I would say the middle of the road lay.
Pre-1973 Homosexuals are deviant people who should be separated from society.
1970-1990: Homosexuals aren’t necessarily deviant, but should keep it to themselves.
1990-2005: Homosexuals should be allowed out in public but shouldn’t be protected from discrimination.
2005-2014 Homosexuals should be protected from discrimination and allowed to form civil unions
2014+ Gays should be allowed to marry.
Of course one can always deplore the racist/homophobic/antisemitic/religiously intolerant/totalitarian sympathyzer beliefs of a person, without letting it affect our appreciation of any good things they did. But actually finding fault in that they should have known better can be contextually tricky. 1870s is not 1970s, New York or Paris is not Mumbai or Oklahoma City.
The Stonewall Riots happened in 1969; this is generally regarded as the “goddammit that’s enough” moment when gays and lesbians began engaging in open, large-scale activism and calling for an end to their oppression. With that as the starting point, I suspect mid-1970s might still have been too soon to say that a person of average morality would be expected to spurn homophobia; I’d put the date closer to 1980, maybe even later.
Jodie Dallas, Billy Crystal’s character on “Soap”, was one of the first openly / unambiguously gay characters on network TV. “Soap” premiered in 1977, and, as I remember it, his character was pretty controversial at that time. Given that, I’d agree with you.
I think you guys are WAY too early, unless you’re talking about hostile, violent homophobia. People were still pretty homophobic up through about the mid-1990s in my experience, although nobody advocated anything violent. There were lots of gay jokes in common circulation, lots of bad stereotyping on TV and in the media, etc… until the latter half of the 1990s, and then it started to calm down a lot.
…and neither were the city state of Thebes in the 4th century BC where the elite of their military, the Sacred Band, was formed of 150 same sex couples.
It sure as hell wasn’t in 1963, when I came out. As far as I knew, I was the ONLY person in the world who actually admitted to being gay. Not that I was totally ok with it, but at least I stopped hiding it. But it would be several more years before anyone started saying it was ok to be gay.
Ironically, a big step forward happened with the AIDS crisis in the '80s. In spite of all the ugly backlash, many people suddenly came to realize that there actually were gay people in their lives, and that we were taking control of our destinies by fighting for our rights. People stopped seeing us as a sideshow, and actually began to respect us.
My sister came out in the late 80s as gay in Utah and there still are relatives who don’t accept her.
I remember tell gay jokes (as well as racist ones) growing up, but that was mostly because we didn’t know any better. I think the first openly gay man I met was in the mid 80s, and while it wasn’t a big deal for me, I remember the disdain by some friends.
Well it still has not. As of today at a guess 4/5 people on earth live in countries and cultures where depending on how its defined, homosexuality is very much not ok.
Perhaps a pertinent partner question would be, “When in history did homophobia start to be okay?” Because the Greeks and Romans were perfectly fine with homosexual relations, as long as you were the penetrator and the relationship was consensual. Hadrian, for example, was criticised because of the latter, not the former. After he was safely dead, of course. I’m guessing that the rise of Christianity might be linked.
Thinking about gay celebrities – individuals like Liberace, Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Freddie Mercury had public personas that were stereotypically “flaming” in the 1960s through the 1980s. While I would imagine that many people suspected that all of them were gay, none of those men felt comfortable in publicly coming out of the closet.
And, of course, someone like Rock Hudson maintained a public persona as a heterosexual, up until he was dying from AIDS, due to fears of what an admission of his homosexuality would do to his career.
I think that this also points to homosexuality still being something that was generally seen as something to conceal, for those who were in the public eye, at least through that era.
I saw Eddie Murphy’s standup special from 1983 recently. He spends the first five minutes making cringe-worthy gay jokes punctuated by “I have no problem with fags, though. I love fags”. It’s tough to imagine now, but that was pretty progressive for the time.
I have to agree with this. The problem is that few people even stopped to think about the morality of it all. It was just a joke to them, or a way to bond with other straight people.
I remember as a child in the early 90s I would make gay jokes with my friends because that’s what young boys from the trailer park did back then, but as soon as I was old enough to make moral judgments of my own (probably around Junior High, Freshman year, mid-90s), it was as simple as “why the hell do I care who fucks who, or who is attracted to whom?”. Consenting adults + no harm = just fine in my opinion.
It was never some morally ambiguous situation. I think for black civil rights and gay rights as well, throughout time, there were three types of people: The ones who had their ideology and identity wrapped up in persecuting these people, the ones who were rightly against that, and the vast majority in between who didn’t give a thought to it one way or the other except to go along with whatever was culturally normal at the time. Those in between were simply amoral, at least on that topic. And amorality is as bad as immorality most of the time.
And unfortunately, I think the current culture of gay acceptance is at least partly bolstered by large numbers of those amoral people. Which means it might not be too difficult for the wrong side to become culturally influential again and switch all those amoral views back to where they were in the 70s and 80s. I’d like to think civil progress is more of a ratchet than a see-saw, but I’m not 100% hopeful there.