Microblog Memes

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"

I'm sorry, but describing the change from the 80s and 90s as small really misses the mark. The changes were huge and substantial. Not fast enough, of course, but it was no small journey.