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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.
I remember it was gay to have both ears, unless they were giant diamond studs to show off your wealth. For most men it was only one earring allowed, left if straight, right ear if gay. I’m thinking of like 2005. Before that it was gay to wear an earring at all.
Also for men it was gay to have index finger longer than ring ringer but for women it was gay to have a longer ring finger. Supposedly scientific based on testosterone exposure in the womb.
I still remember the first openly gay guy that I ever met. He had an earring in his right ear. I was like did you know that’s gay and he was like yeah I’m gay. Blew my mind lol.
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.
“left is right, right is wrong”
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do.
What about if your palm was bigger than your face?
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You’re not straight unless you don’t shower and love eating dog shit in your meals
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).
It’s that way here in Seattle as well. When I moved here 18 years ago my now step brothers told me don’t ever use an umbrella unless you want to be mistaken as a tourist or gay. Too bad I already had that second one on lock.
In their defense, the gaybies on Capital Hill love umbrellas to preserve their look.
Now that’s just nass.
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.
Turn off your vpn, that did it for me
It’s loading in Boost.
If you’re not seeing it when you go to the URL your ISP or firewall might be blocking it? Could be many things.
I don’t see an image.
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.
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”
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.
You could probably argue that the earlier you got the more taboo it was to include gay jokes and that as the window shifted it became okay to joke about.
Take something everyone should (hopefully) view as taboo like pedophilia. Sure, you can make jokes about “these look like pedophile glasses” or the like, but it’s generally raunchier. More of the type of thing you’d see in PG-13 / R movies. You could perhaps say that as it became more normal to be gay, more people made jokes about it in more media? But it’s not like I have any sort of statistics on this lol.
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.
AIDS!
Yep, we were doing so well and now look at us.
I should say doing well in terms of direction, not absolutes.
What if I just have a hard on for the Soviet subway?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You still hear a prison rape joke every now and then.
Like it’s hilarious that we let wards of the State get tortured by other inmates, presumably because they “deserve” it.
Not a thought to “hmm, maybe if we’re essentially sentencing someone to be raped then there’s a systemic problem to be addressed,” and often times “why do you love criminals so much” if you voice an opinion contrary to the accepted wisdom that they had it coming.
The only prison rape jokes I’ve heard in the last 10 years are about paedophiles “getting what they deserve in prison”
Which I didn’t really think was a funny haha joke, just a “I don’t know how to respond or fathom paedophilia, it’s deeply uncomfortable and unsettling…haha”
I also personally don’t know how I feel about those kinds of jokes.
The rule in comedy is never punch down, but hopefully that’s where you’ve got to aim if you’re targeting a convicted child molester, I don’t think I’m better than anyone, I believe all human life has equal inherent value…but I also think I’m better than a child molester and that given control of a runaway trolley, their life has less value.
That sure is some cognitive dissonance, so cracking a joke at the expense of a paedophile in prison is easier than confronting my own opinions towards the value of human life.
I just watched some show from the 90s where the punchline is that the character was going to get sexually molested in a dark room. I can’t believe that got a thumbs up.
y’all remember what they called white people who enjoyed hiphop
Do you mean wigga?
Listen, I just really like wigs
We had one for Asians who liked hipho too… Kids come up with the craziest shit 😬
Oh, right… I forgot about that one because it’s also the word for a pest in my area, double whammy slur
Apparently it’s also now a slur for fake rednecks? So that’s nice.
And so the world turns. What was old is new again 😭😭😭
That was especially hilarious when I learned about the “whig” party in early US history.
“Holy shit! They were saying that back then??”
I’m not sure which one you mean. Wiggas? That’s the one they used in Sweden.
Yeah but mostly hard r around my area.
I legit don’t know what that means. Not American.
Oh wait. You mean the ending ‘r’?
… yeah…
Oof I watched a clip from clerks 2 the other day where they drop the hard R multiple times and wow I did not remember them going that hard.
huh. I always just figured metrosexual just meant someone who really loved public transit.
I’m a sweet Tramsvestite, from Transitsexual, Trainsylvania~~~~
Dammit. That is legitimately funny.
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.
If the Queer Eye fans of today watched an OG episode I think they’d pass out from shock.
I was living under a rock when the new Queer Eye came out and some of the young residents at work were raving about it. The things I kept overhearing had me thinking “They can’t possibly be talking about catty old Carson”
The homophobia of the 2000s paired perfectly with all the other toxic body shaming and slut shaming the media was doing at the time.
Bridge building was exactly right. It was about getting the language of “gay” into the homes of everyday people and in a tone that was happy and humerus, not divisive. Yeswere the butt of the joke, but at least it was just a joke, unlike in the years prior when it was violence.
We still have the language in the household of everyday people, but in many households the only reason the word “gay” gets brought up is for someone to spit at it and praise Trump. The happy humour is lost, the tone is shifting to vitriol and if we’re not careful the next step will be violence again.
My wife and I watch a lot of sitcoms before bed, often from the 00s. One had at least one anti-gay joke per episode. In one of the middle seasons, they had an episode where a character makes a gay friend and has to deal with their discomfort around gay people. Then the next episode, they’re back to gay bashing. Wild times.
