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On a slight tangent but movies and TV shows always reflect the way society is at that point in time. It puts on display what was valued, what was of concern, etc. This is true regardless of the genre.
Changing scenes or using cgi to remove things we would now consider"problematic" is like erasing history.
As someone who grew up in the late 90's and early 00's as a christian midwest kid, it is a constant struggle to deprogram that stuff because it was EVERYWHERE.
I'm quite literally LGBTQ+ and it's still a struggle.
I remember in school we kids had 'gay' tests we would do on each other. Depending on how you checked your nails or shoe for dirt, stuff like that.
In my school you were gay if your index finger was shorter than your ring finger, or if your wore one earring.
you were gay if your index finger was shorter than your ring finger
And then when they hold up their hand to check, you slap it into their face.
I remember kids in the '60s making a big deal that our milk cartons said "homo" on them.
I had the earring thing in mine too, but it had to be the right ear to be gay. Left ear was fine.
This is a holdover of gay hookup codes.
Basically every generation of queer folk back when being queer meant a legitimate threat to life (imprisonment, castration, torture or violence) or through precarity (being disowned, losing one's job or benefits) queer folk lived like spies and used codes to quietly signal their status to others. There are some that have been easily lost to history but some would either be decoded and then become too dangerous to use openly... Or the straights would think it's neat and adopt the fashion without realizing what it actually was being used for likewise making it too dangerous to openly use. So there's these layers of abandoned code.
Modern codes are more complex and not as covert as folk have realized that a lot of straights wouldn't know queer code if it came up and performed a drag routine on their nose. Like Pride events people wear flag colors that tell you what their deal is but straight folk only really tend to recognize maybe a handful. Others are less obvious, there's a club color code of bandana that is very specific to kink and sexual orientation depending on what color and how you wear it.
I've heard of that and always assumed it was part of some club/bar culture. A shorthand way of signaling to potential hookups who you were looking for. Never paid it much attention in my day to day life though.
Also, I assumed two earrings meant you were bi.
I used to be called a faggot (slur for gay) in this era and still now by some of my more monkey brained friends for using an umbrella when it rained.
Like it’s gay to not want to get wet and feel icky all day 😂.
Don't ever come to Germany. :) "We are not made of sugar!" Not wanting to get wet in the rain is defintly frowned upon here (also true if you are gay).
You're not straight unless you don't shower and love eating dog shit in your meals
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.
Yeah, having lived on the cusp as well, it sucked but it sounds like you and I both managed to catch the better half of that cultural transition.
In the early 2000s, coming out of the 90s it felt like every week someone you knew got jumped on the street and was in hospital getting their face sewn back together.
A boy at a school near me was violently raped and murdered by 2 other boys who then claimed gay panic as their legal defence. I remember the details of this case (which I won't go into, it was vile) because it was so close to home and so grotesque, but stories like this were a seasonal occurrence across the country.
I myself coped my fair share of physical trauma, I was lucky to only get bashed once and I was with a group, but I was less lucky when it came to correctional sexual assault.
And it felt like this for most of my youth, and I pushed to build confidence and assertiveness and develop vigilance skills to protect myself.
Slowly over time I felt less afraid, and it was only in hindsight, as the "FCK H8" campaign started spreading in my country from America, it dawned on me that I didn't feel safer because I was getting more confident, I felt safer because it was safer. Sooooo much safer.
And that was just in ~8 years of my adolescent life in the 2000s, so I can extrapolate from that how bad it was in the 8 years before I was paying attention to the world, and the 8 years before that, and before that.
My state is currently considered the more gay friendly, ironic seeing as we were the last state to reduce the criminal sentence for homosexuality from the death penalty in 1949...but then my state was the 2nd state to decriminalised homosexuality in 1980 compared to the last state in my country, 1997. So I guess we picked up queer steam.
For added historical context, after it was decided that death might be a little to harsh a punishment, "attempted buggery" (aka, two men flirting with each other) could carry a 7 year sentence, and buggery "with or without consent" anywhere from 14 to life.
In 1957 they re-opened a whole ass 19th century goal exclusively to house hordes of gay prisoners who had been arrested for gay crimes.
If you're interested in some history, dig into "Cooma" the world's first and only (hopefully) gay prison. Police inflated arrests with entrapment stings to stock the cells because the prisoners were being used for medical experiments around chemical castration and conversion for scientific research and "rehabilitation", the men were tortured in an attempt to "cure" them so they would be "safe to release", the prison conveniently lost their archives so they can't say when they stopped experimenting on gay prisoners, but the last gay prisoners to be sent to Cooma was around 1982.
Edit: I rambled so long I never made an actual point.
It sucked for us in the 2000s, but it was exponentially worse for every year you go back. That's a trend I want to continue, I want kids 10 years from now to say "wow it's tough being queer, there's so much queer baiting in the media" because it would make me so happy for that to be the biggest problem gay kids face.
I don't say "back in my day things were worse" to mean "be greatful and shut up" but rather "wow I can't believe the young people in our community are still suffering, at least they're not being physically harmed like it was back in the day, but this is still not okay, let's look at where we came from to remember where we are going, and keep fighting for our rights, together"
how insanely homophobic the early 2000's were
Me as a Gen X'er who lived during the 80's and 90's and witnessed the absolute rage hatred for gay and trans people during that time.
Is the image not loading for anyone else? Neither in apps, tried both sync for lemmy and voyager, tried opening in a browser on both my phone and computer, with any without adblocker and VPN, it just sits and loads infinitely. I tried going to the base URL for the site and that does the same.
The whole concept of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" was so weird and very of its time. And that was considered pretty progressive at the time.
The sad thing is that it was fairly progressive then to have openly gay men on TV who weren't there as either the butt of a joke or a flamboyant "gay bestie" stereotype.
The millennials spearheaded the LGBT rights, but we're also the ones who had been trans- and homophobes growing up in 90s and 00s, with or without realising it.
Character development, I guess?
Spearheaded the LGBT rights?
Some of us literally battled it out in the streets in the 80s and 90s. People fucking died. We were expelled from our families.
It's hard not to take offense to your comment. Millennials did not spearhead shit. You were GIVEN the opportunity to be yourselves.
edit: Don't think that I don't appreciate that we still have boundaries to push. The war against sexuality isn't over, and the old warriors are still here. We just don't make as much noise these days.
Sorry, saying spearhead is a wrong choice of word. I didn't mean to downplay the previous generations of lgbt rights activists, like Harvey Milk. I suppose what I mean is that millenials are the ones who have finally made lgbt acceptance come to fruition.
Here's what many people don't understand. Millennials and the younger generations are not more diverse. They didn't make it popular. Sexual diversity has always existed.
The difference is that by the time you came around generations previous had been fighting for the right to exist. Those that didn't have the ability or desire to fight for themselves simply remained 'in the closet' (a phrase I'm not fond of). But we made a TON of progress in the 80s and 90s so by the time you came along people were finally able to TRY and understand. Before that it wasn't really even a question of if you would be accepted. You knew you weren't. Again, millennials were GIVEN the opportunity to be accepted by those that came before them, quite possibly even close family members who they never realized fought for those rights even when they would never get them.
If you need a specific example to get it... My brother has a child that is non-binary. They get to have a relationship with their grandparents (my parents) ONLY because my parents understand now that refusing to accept would mean the loss of the relationship completely. If I had not made the sacrifices I did back then, that child would not have had the benefit of loving grandparents. In fact I'm often jealous because by the time my parents realized that they were wrong, it was too late for me. The damage had already been done. I will never know what it's like to have a family, to talk to adult siblings about growing up. I'm still on the outside because my siblings were too young to really know what happened. To dig all of that up now would only damage their relationships and why would I do that? I know what it's like to not have any support networks.
You should be happy with the freedom you were born into. I'm happy for your generation. I would go back and do it again.
And one of my biggest fears is that I might have to.
It's hard not to take offense to your comment. Millennials did not spearhead shit. You were GIVEN the opportunity to be yourselves.
As a Millennial hard agree there. The old guard had to deal with mobs running the bars, institutions letting them die and in select places forming militia to prevent people from going out and beating queer people for fun. Millennials aren't the spearhead, we're like mid shaft of the spear at best.
That being said we're all gunna have to go back to the hardcore roots if we want to uphold the civil rights wins of the past. This all is gunna get messy.
Yeah, GenX really took the reins on this one. By the time millennials were old enough to actually affect change, most of the blood had been spilled and the dust had already settled.
Yea, as a millennial, it's kinda depressing to hear some of us take credit for being the spearhead when previous generations were the ones who went through things like the Stonewall Riots and started Pride.
We absolutely were not the spearhead. We were supposed to be the bulwark to prevent it from backsliding and we failed.
We Millenials consumed Gen X made media and Gen Xer's pop cultural was very "Its fun to be cruel to weaklings and weirdos, be against consumerist modern life dweebs, and swear in front of old ladies. We're so punk."
Gen X 90's culture being all about being a renegade nihilistic slacker as a reaction to the 80's culture which was a lot more colorful, consumerist, and earnest at an almost saccharine level, even when it was trying to "rebel".
EDIT: To clarify, Millenials consumed edgelord stuff from Gen X, and homophobia was edgey.
My talent as a homophobic millennial knew no bounds in the 2000s
I'd unironically call some straight girl a raging lesbo for wearing old burkes, then jump on the GSA forum and tell some teenager "it's okay to be gay, it gets better, when I first came out you'd get bashed so things are improving" like I wasn't part of the ongoing problem....
What was wrong with us back then!?
(I was definitely transphobic AF back then too! I have no excuses for it, especially because it turns out I tick that box as well)
The "not that there's anything wrong with that" episode of Seinfeld kind of summarizes the attitudes at the time. I don't think the majority of millennials ever were against gay people (I'm sure there were exceptions regionally) but there was heavy stereotyping, which of course was a form of othering. And yeah the 90s were very no filter in general. At this time people viewed poking fun as a form of acceptance. But it took some time for the stereotypes to die down.
Oh, and rape was funny. We were supposed to laugh at victims of rape, especially men being eaped in prisons, but occasionally women being raped as well.
huh. I always just figured metrosexual just meant someone who really loved public transit.
That take seems a bit inaccurate.
Metrosexual meant going above & beyond in male beauty care (a pretty low bar): going to a salon to get manicures & pedicures, maybe apply foundation & eyeliner, manscaping. Possibly wearing those low-heel shoes that show the ankles without socks.
I also remember the words fag and like being ambiguous such that in written contexts I'd sometimes see the clarification good kind of fag to mean homosexual in contrast to an insult directed at someone the insulter dislikes (for being pretentious, aggravating, annoying or whatever). In speech, the distinction was often understood from tone & context, so someone could be a fag (homosexual) yet not an effing fag (detestable), and their company might be absolutely welcome for that reason. An insulter would usually pile on imagery of the subject performing homosexual acts as the recipient of such insults typically disapproves portrayals of themselves that way. The insult was a way to puncture egos & authorities claiming a traditionally masculine image. It wasn't particularly effective against out & proud homosexuals or people who weren't homophobic. While fag wasn't always an insult, however, bigots & religious zealots often drew no distinction, either.
Fun fact: the term was literally invented by the British tabloid press to explain how (football superstar and husband of Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham) David Beckham could wear a sarong without being secretly gay.
I wish I was making it up but that's genuinely the origin of the term 🤦
Every time I come across forum posts from the 2000s I lose a little bit of nostalgia for that period of time. The casual bigotry was fucking everywhere.
What if I just have a hard on for the Soviet subway?