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that is excellent news, indeed. 🌈 🫂

I was born in the mid 40s. The draft ended by the 70s. Segregation ended by the late 60s. 2 deadly viral pandemics are now contained. By 2011 gays could serve in the military & by 2015 could marry. However the Fascists have ended abortion rights & attacking other rights of my lifetime.

yes this is important. and I think despite recent setbacks black Americans are on balance better off. Wish I didn’t feel we are backsliding rapidly however for both communities.

My kids have married same sex parents and we’re both on their birth certificates.

Anyone who tries to push those rights back needs punching. It was so bad before. So bad.

Not only did the press secretary make gay jokes, most of the White House press joined in

And those are just the headliners, as you note, tons of smaller but no less important changes going on at the same time.

Interesting, I'm straight and also boring so I was genuinely curious Hopefully those meds stay accessible

I also think some people, imo those less willing to rock the boat, were very likely to remain closeted for a long time/forever. Basically being "edgy" meant you were more likely to be out.

Plus: I might lose my job and most of my social circle if any of them find out.

I realize this is a bit of a joke, but fwiw there have always been normie gay people -- you're just less likely to remember them. And ... the whole bit about gayness as a sort of fantasy space for straights ... there are worse stereotypes, but it's a little weird.

"Gay-Straight Alliances" had to be a thing for a reason! "OMG that's so GAY," meaning "that thing sucks" was everywhere Funnily enough, my high school friend who said that the most just recently sadly ended a 10-year relationship to another man but he is still one of the queerest people I know

I will continue to fight to stay that way because we are regressing so much now it's disgusting. Hugs.

And of course people on PrEP/PEP are still deferred due to the risk of false negative HIV tests, so a lot of men still get deferred, but it's much btter now than the blanket ban it used to be. I'm one of the people who can donate now with the rule change so I'm particularly emotional about it.

nono, I agree. The term had charm but clearly it was used to euphemistically provide cover for something deemed as unwelcomed. Once we outgrew that general sentiment of unwelcome (which I believe was your point), the euphemism outgrew its use, though it had once applied to playboys and misogynists.

God willing, you don't lose any of it due to hateful bigots of the Christian Nationalist variety. Or bigots of any stripe. Love, after all, is love and beats hate by a mile! 🏳️‍🌈❤️👍

💯. I am independent and the many of times I have men ask me if I wasn’t scared to live alone is SHOCKING. Like we have to have a man or we are open season. It’s disgusting.

This is what its all about for real. Almost makes me wanna tear up.

Broccoli-topped boys holding hands in the hall and all that. Wild stuff.

LGBT and Neurodiverse people are the two groups that have made the most progress in the last 30 years. From being regarded as freakish social outcasts to... well not 100% accepted; but it's much easier to be out and honest about it than it was then.

It changed so fast too, I'm only 30 and no one was out (willingly) until about age 17 at my school/sixth form in the UK. But not that many years later and it seemed like people were coming out much younger.

The Episcopalian middle school I went to that was extremely conservative on LGBT+ matters is now (on paper, at least) actively affirming of both gay and trans students. And I was there in the early 2000s. It's only been 20 years! That's huge!

which is kind of important when trying to get across just how much toothpaste the jagoffs in charge are trying to funnel back into its tube

My friend has a lot of negative things to say about his violent, racist, and drug addicted father, but one thing he can never take away from him was when my friend came out to him in the 00s, friend asked his dad if he was bothered by it and got a no.

despite the fact that we'd all known he was gay for the better part of two decades??? he eventually said he'd been confused & went back in the closet for years (until he moved out of state) i cannot imagine that reaction nowadays, I feel like people would be too embarrassed?

Nope. There may be individual food items that are worse (mostly stuff that was always crap getting worse, like soda going hfcs), but produce is better, prepared foods are infinitely better, restaurants as well, and breadth of options incomprehensibly better.

I was a kid in a bourgie neighborhood in Chicago in the 80s and food was so inferior in terms of average quality and breadth of availability. Even McD‘s was incomprehensibly worse.

Gay rights have advanced hugely here in Ireland, where we have marriage equality, several gay politicians, and had an openly gay Taoiseach (prime minister). I absolutely hate the creeping rise of the Q word - an unwelcome, toxic Americanism that is Not universally accepted - but otherwise, progress.

One of the areas I can see that has improved is the integration of special needs students into mainstream classrooms. Admittedly, there is work still to be done; however, when I was in school, special needs students were totally sequestered from the student body. They ate and recessed separately.

In 2004, my biology teacher made a joke about how white heads were dead phagocytes, or, as he likes to say "dead phags"

Hearing the stories from the gay community about how it affected them in the 80’s is just absolutely mind blowing. Even as a younger person I couldn’t conceptualize how traumatizing it must have been, only in recent years.

As much as we have slid backwards in many ways the last 10 years, we are still way better off than the 80s.

What are your thoughts on younger queer men born in the 2000s? From their perspective, they've likely seen things peak and get worse. I suspect it's hard for them to even imagine how bad the 80s-90s really were.

Things I love to hear... 🥰

I never realized how much of a weight I was carrying until it was gone.

Have to remind yourself that the fact that they sometimes struggle to understand stuff like what peer hyperstereotyping looked like in the '90s is itself progress (To be fair, there are still plenty of places where kids don't need any historical lessons to get these things)

(I also didn't understand why sometimes in RENT Angel got called "she" and sometimes "he" I was not smart until my mid-20s)

Cassie Pritchard's description of Wu as "she wants to Turn Back The Clock in both senses of the phrase" is still one of the most incandescent burns I've ever seen, right up there with telling a "kids are spoiled today" ranting Max Landis that he had zero right to complain about helicopter parents

Not even that long ago. *California* passed Prop 8 in 2008. That's not even 20 years.