this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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This is weird. The 90's were so homophobic it was normal. The people who were saying "it's ok to be gay" were considered fringe and extreme. This is the decade where it was subversive and radical for gay people to "come out of the closet".
In the 80's, people lost their jobs and there were news specials to talk about this hidden side of society that nobody knew about. In the 80's a significant amount of people were saying "yeah Aids is bad, but it's punishment for the gays so not really that bad..."
Jump to the 2000's and being gay was becoming a normal and open thing and society was adjusting to this idea. The liberal half of the country was already on board and saying "this is ok and normal" and the conservative/religious side of the country was still trying to hold on to their laws to punish and criminalize gay sex.
My point is that the 2000's were the good days and the 90's and 80's were the dark days of homophobia. Pointing back at the 2000's and saying "WOW, LOOK AT HOW THEY TREATED GAY JOKES" really misses how massively far we came in a few decades and how much worse it was even a decade before that.
The 00s was still pretty homophobic in spite of small steps that you mentioned. I grew up in 00s and I remember the kids would casually use the word gay to dismiss something they don't like. Then when I was adolescent, it's a social death sentence to be rumoured as a gay person.
I'm sorry, but describing the change from the 80s and 90s as small really misses the mark. The changes were huge and substantial. Not fast enough, of course, but it was no small journey.