I saw a conversation here where someone thought homophobia wasn’t that bad in the 90s.
I had someone else say they didn’t remember any anti-Japanese racism in Australia in the 90s. I being on the receiving end of it would remember it pretty strongly, but to forget it entirely?
Just really poor memory
(History? I guess this is history subbear. Given how much people seem to misinterpret events happening now, what does that say about writing of events at the tim?)
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.