Shit homophobia was really bad even in the aughts.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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Right? Gay was used as a pejorative very commonly during those years. It still was extremely taboo during those years to be anywhere on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum.
Gay was used as a pejorative very commonly during those years.
It still is in many circles, along with the f slur 
I don't think homophobia ever got better, I'm just not in highschool anymore where those same 3 dudes quote family guy constantly and have favorite slurs had a captive audience. At pretty much any job, you can at least get fired for being annoying (also discrimination laws).
Gen Z has grown a lot thankfully, it's slow going but progress has been made
i think it got better in a lot of media, but i probably still don't want to be visibly queer in most of the places you wouldn't want to be visibly queer 15 years ago
idk about the US, but as most late transitioners i've put a ton of thought into why i didn't come out earlier and ... let me put it like this, for legally changing my name and gender marker, it would've been mandatory to get forced sterilization until 2012 and that name and gender marker change would've been voided if i had stashed some sperm somewhere to sire a kid and my nazi-ass country would have found out about that.
I'm not saying transphobia isn't a thing anymore, far from it. Particularly for the elite in politics, media and academia, my basic human rights are still up for debate in a way that the basic human rights of gay people where up for debate 15 years ago, but i rarely get into trouble irl, and that absolutely would've been different 15 years ago. And that's just mainstream society, i'd also say that there's been a particularly huge change for the better in how feminist and lesbian communities treat transfems. And all of that relates exclusively to my experience as a trans woman, and as a group we've always faced a lot more open attacks, both verbally, physically and especially sexually, than cis gay men.
So yeah, i probably couldn't have endured being visibly queer in my state 15 years ago and it's fairly doable nowadays. I'm not saying it's the same all over the world, but people here really need to understand that not every place in the world is AmeriKKKa.
Tbh yeah you're right
It's still really bad today in most countries. And for those that live in countries where homophobia is no longer "as bad", do you really think that the abrupt change in opinion by the straights over the last decade is legitimate? From the outside, I don't buy it.
It only got better when the West realized they could weaponize it through pinkwashing, so it only got better insofar as pinkwashing could only work if Western society is (superficially) tolerant of queer people.
What would they be pretending for?
I remember people in the 2000’s hating SpongeBob because they thought it promoted homosexuality.
All of the arguments given to try to get me to hate trans people ... were first pounded into my brain when I was a kid in the 80's/90's, but they were aimed at gay people then.
The bullying, the physical violence, the murder... all were there to.
people think 2019 is long enough ago that we should all get over (insert whatever), so yeah that traks
Australia remains racist, homophobia is rampant
People forget stuff in the span of five years. It's rough to witness, to be sure.
Being a leftist is to be cursed with a memory
I saw a conversation here where someone thought homophobia wasn't that bad in the 90s.
"Homophobia wasn't that bad at a time when it was a common coming of youth ritual to hunt gay people at night for sport."
Kinda similarly, I find it annoying that libs pretend far right rhetoric only became prevalent in mainstream politics because of Trump when I distinctly remember being weirded the fuck out by seeing Bush senior’s Willie Horton ads and Hillary’s super-predator speech as a kid way back in the 80s and 90s
Any chance the people failing to remember aren't part of the minority in question? Many people are blind to oppressions because they haven't personally faced them or thought of them as jokes or otherwise minor, as they did not experience any negative outcomes due to them.
But yeah homophobia was rampant in the 90s. Gay was a slur equivalent to being bad or stupid, mainstream media was rife with it, and of course gay people were almost entirely closeted, including people with power or other things we'd recognize as privilege. I had closeted friends that were afraid of their parents. Literally 100% of them are doing great now, which is something that gives me a lot of joy and hope for us as a society.
Also want to validate the anti-Japanese racism of the 90s, generally conglomerated around anti-Asian stereotypes. Who thinks this wasn't rampant!?
I think a lot was Japan because Japan's economy was doing pretty well during the 90s, not that the sort of person engaging in slurs can tell the difference between different east Asians. I remember it cooled off by the time I graduated high school, but it was pretty constant until about 2003.
Finding an old Australian joke book from the era that has a decent amount of Japanese businessman, Japanese tourist, Japanese small dick jokes (also a weirdly high proportion of divorce, cheating, and unhappy marriage jokes, also gay jokes). But the jokes kinda are the tip of the iceberg. If the jokes were the worst thing happening, it would be shit but not as bad as being assaulted, denied access to communities, being more heavily policed and observed, not having wrongs taken against you as seriously... you know, marginalised.
But also yes, it's usually straight white dudes who don't remember
Sorry you had to experience that. I don't quite have the words to communicate enough solidarity but I can validate that that is terrible, it happened, and it shouldn't be something that happens.
I personally am not from Australia but a lot translates due to Anglo cultural influence. Plenty of "(anti-Japanese)" racism among the people that should've taught me ethics rather than racism or bitterness. And an astounding amount of pro-Italian thinking despite both anything vaguely Italian and anything vaguely Japanese being of the same "axis" in terms of the war propaganda influence on racist rhetoric.
Also ran into a fair share of people obsessed with Japanese pop culture. Both racists who had the worst opinions and behavior you can think of and then also people really into some Japanese band or art.
Anyways sorry again that you had to go through that. And sorry there are people who want to pretend it didn't happen.
Yeah, anime was a major cultural import at the same time. Dragonball Z, pokemon, Digimon, sailor moon on TV in the morning
I'd kind of forgotten all the "asian men have small penises" joke thing. "All politics is sexual pathology" moment.
I thought Japan's economy was doing terribly in the 90s, wasn't the big bubble in the 80s?
My memory was a collapse of sorts in the mid to late 90s. But I could be wrong, I just remember what it was like here in oz
Any chance the people failing to remember aren't part of the minority in question?
This has to be it. I don't strongly qualify for any of the letters in LGBTQ+, unless you really want to add woman or "not a 10/10 supermodel" and the only difference in anti-LGBT rhetoric I've seen in my life is that I'm not required to interact with assholes after highschool and college. Even at jobs reactionaries usually tone it down, at least tone down the doing-it-openly and the targeting-somebody parts. The worst I usually see is by randos on the internet or like if I'm at a bar or if I'm dating a guy who has that extra sus friend or 50% of anyone's older relatives. I see misogyny all the time though, and also I see people who-aren't-women claim misogyny doesn't happen anymore. It's obvious to me that I don't see anti-LGBT so much because I'm not a target.
Any chance the people failing to remember aren't part of the minority in question?
Pretty much a given. I mean, sure, there are a few older people from marginalized groups who'll downplay the discrimination they've faced as part of a coping mechanism, i see that a lot with transmeds for example. But i'm also fairly sure that the debatebro dingus from dbzer0 who barged into the thread about queer liberation to claim that calling everything "gay" in the 90s had nothing to do with homophobia and that nobody had anything against actual gay people didn't actually know any gay people because they all stayed in the closet in his shitty homophobic highschool.
When it comes to homophobia in particular, western chauvinists are frighteningly good at minimizing the fact that showing acceptance towards gay people only became something that wasn't ridiculed in mainstream society a mere decade ago (this goes especially for gay men, being halfway ok about lesbians is a bit older than that. Let's not get into how far bi acceptance is, because boy oh boy is that still a shitshow). Before the mid 2010s, all the straights were if not outright hostile, then at least incredibly weird about the subject, they always had to make up for being inclusive with saying something shitty and homophobic as well or to deflect in another way to not come off as gay themselves. That's just how it was "back then", and that "back then" is in living memory for everybody on this site. And ofc the people who have memory holed this are all cishets. Even the most reactionary homonationalists i know are painfully aware how recent tolerance towards gay people is.
Wasn't the prospect of Japan taking over the world a recurring plot thread in speculative '90s political fiction? Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor (1994), that kind of thing. Also seems like a line of thought in op-eds from the period.
Constantly. Cyberpunk leaned heavily in to the idea that cheap consumer electronics would vault Japan to global domination.
lol they were just east a little bit too far
It doesn't help that our current power structure is making a real effort to forget its crimes. I'm sure in a years time, all my lib friends will say that they were on the side of Gaza from day one.
The latest death panel episode talks about how the state is using its power to make people forget the uprisings of 2020 and the early pandemic responses (increased social safety net). It’s central to the project that we forget what is possible and what we achieved.
This is a clip from Dennis Norden's Laughter File about a current affairs piece that took place in Adelaide, South Australia. The TV show in question aired from 1991 to 2006, so this is squarely within the range of dates in question:
Tell me, if it was deemed acceptable for a newspaper to run a classified advertisement which was clearly one that had been lodged via phone that stated "No Asians" (in common Australian parlance this refers to East & SE Asians exclusively) at the end, what does that say about the level of permissible bigotry against Asians?
[CW: police brutality, queerphobic murder]
While we're talking about South Australia, this was the first state in Australia to decriminalise homosexuality in response to senior police officers intentionally murdering Professor George Duncan. This was in 1972.
To think that Australian culture would go from a group of police officers murdering a queer person and there being an extensive cover-up and the typical government obstructionist bullshit and then, skip forward less than two decades, and things are just rosy for gay people in Australia?
Bro, what??
Those cops who killed a queer man in cold blood were probably still alive in the 90s and they themselves weren't prosecuted, lynched, or complete social pariahs so what does that say about Australia's level of homophobia in the 90s exactly if not for the fact that it was extremely permissive towards it at the absolute minimum?
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Big oof. People just don't remember how much worse the recent past was, at least in a lot of the West.
It's change, some people just don't put a lot of thought and follow the society. I believe it's the same these days, in the future we will look back in disbelief.