Microblog Memes

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 😂.

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.

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.

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.

You're not straight unless you don't shower and love eating dog shit in your meals

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

y'all remember what they called white people who enjoyed hiphop

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 🤦

It's like you forgot that "queer eye for a straight guy" was one of the most popular shows at the time. Would have been completely unheard of just a decade earlier.

Much of the 2000's was bridge building, many people who had never even seen or met a homosexual was first introduced to the culture by shows in the 2000's. I know I was.

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.

That came about partly because homosexuality in the US was legalized on June 26, 2003. Without the fear of raids, people started talking more openly about sexuality and the tide was turning slowly more positive that movies and TV shows that joined the conversation weren't immediately shut down.

The culture shift is stark sometimes when you watch old stuff.

On the other hand, don't let them turn that into an excuse. You know what dealt with trans rights in a pretty honest, raw, and understanding way, in the mid 1980s? Fucking Hill Street Blues. One of the cops gets together with a woman, he's happy to be with her, and then the other cops start giving him hell for it because she used to be a man. He gets disgusted and angry, goes over to her place, and she lectures him about it and sets him straight, tells him to figure out if he wants to be with her, but don't try to turn who I am into some kind of thing I did to you, or make me feel bad about it. He sort of accepts it, because she clearly has a point, and that's the end of the episode.

Hill Street Blues, man.

Hell the 2000's were bad - but it was just an extension to decades, if not centuries of homophobia. Watch the first 5 minutes of Eddie Murphy's RAW to see what was socially acceptable to say in the late 70's, early 80's.

I been watching some movies and TV shows from the early 2000s as a nostalgia trip with my wife and man there were some terrible lessons. We talked about the homophobia and transphobia but the misogyny, body image and sexualization of teens. The skin women being called fat with the fashion that only looked good on thin thin thin women. The insistence that there was nothing worse than being a virgin. (While the schools were doing an abstinence only education BTW). The countdown clocks to when every female celebrity turned 18 everywhere. It's surreal to think that message was everywhere.