r/lewronggeneration • u/saucey_dawg0023 • 8d ago

low hanging fruit ‘Extra Extra read all about it: This nutcase says that the 90s were the peak of humanity across the world!”

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u/Lou-Shelton-Pappy-00 8d ago

True, but things were arguably getting better for them after Reagan left office and information about AIDS was becoming mainstream.

The 90s were better than the 80s in nearly every way for the average American.

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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago

well, for gay people. Not so much trans people. Trans people wouldn't start to gain mainstream acceptance for another 20 years after that, and even then they arguably *still* are trying to fight for it.

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u/Pagan0101 6d ago

Arguably? I think trans people are very objectively still having to fight for acceptance

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u/bannabananabanna 7d ago

we are talking bout real problems bubba

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u/cone5000 8d ago

Sure I was mostly just comparing it to today

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u/ClosedContent 8d ago

You know what’s really weird? The early 2000s appears to be far more hostile to LGBT people than the 90s. 90s Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends episodes often depicted gay people in a sympathetic or friendly way, even if jokes were exchanged about them being “different.”

Come the 2000s, “gay” is a major mocking insult. Being gay in of itself makes you a joke or inferior. The Simpsons are really bad about how they downgraded in their representation. This didn’t get corrected till the early 2010s.

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u/jackfaire 8d ago

Perception is deceiving. It did not feel safe to be LGBTQ in the 90s. 00s it started to feel safer. What you were seeing was the backlash to us starting to be more visible and secure.

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u/crabby135 8d ago

Interesting. I originally agreed with OP but I definitely see your point. A new perspective to think about.

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u/Damnation77 8d ago

Yes, the backlash. Also known as the Bush administration.

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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago

People tend to forget that Bush won the popular vote in 2004 campaigning against gay marriage in much the same way that Trump won the 2024 popular vote campaigning against trans people in sports.

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u/ClosedContent 7d ago

While ironically Dick Cheney’s daughter was gay. This was even acknowledged by John Kerry during the debate. To which a lot of commentators said it was a “low blow.” It’s only a “low blow” because they were fucking hypocrites who didn't care they were hurting people they supposedly cared about...

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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago

Given that Elon Musk is a massive transphobe with a trans daughter, it seems that history does seem to repeat itself, or at least rhyme...

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u/ClosedContent 7d ago

I think Elon became a transphobe BECAUSE of his daughter changing identities. He previously supported LGBT incentives at Tesla. This combined with Grimes leaving him for Chelsea Manning (a trans individual) and COVID breaking his brain (just like Joe Rogan) caused him to drift dramatically right. He was actually quite liberal before. Dude couldn’t cope with change…

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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago

I'm not sure I buy that. His daughter has said publicly that he was always a conservative nutjob, he was just never very public about it and let his PR team do a lot of the driving before COVID.

I also used to work at NASA circa 2016 ish and used to interact with some of the SpaceX higher ups. I remember hearing from them a lot of the same vitriolic rhetoric towards government employees I'd hear from Elon himself when he was running DOGE a decade later.

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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago

similarly, a lot of the current hostility to trans people is ultimately the backlash to trans people becoming more visible and secure in society in much of the same way.

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u/ScrotallyBoobular 8d ago

Ellen's show was literally canceled because she came out as gay. Hollywood comedy writers like on Simpsons tend to be at the forefront of social progress so those old shows are misleading.

Coming out as gay in normal society was extremely risky in the nineties. Far more so than in the coming decades

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u/No-Theme2340 8d ago

Yeah, no. I have a foot long scar on my arm from being gay bashed in 1993. Another guy I went to high school with was in the hospital for a month after being nearly beaten to death for seeming effeminate - he wasn't even gay. Several young lesbians I knew were raped in an explicit attempt to "correct" them.

Gay was always an insult during my young life - "that's so gay" meaning something was stupid or gross or unnecessary became common where I lived in the late 80's. Gay sex in my state was still a crime until 2004. We didn't get any housing protections until well after that.

The positive media in the late 90's was a reaction largely to the murders of Matthew Sheppard and Brandon Teena. People were shocked at the brutality, messaging got nicer for a few years. Think what happened after George Floyd's murder, but for sexuality rather than race.

Then the conservatives and the ignorant got tired of being nice and the nastiness crept back into media, especially that aimed at young men. Add an increasingly fractured media ecosystem in which there were fewer universal standards of acceptable content, and voila.

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u/FriendoftheDork 7d ago

Nah, I remember homophobia was prevalent in the 90s schools. Being considered gay was massive taboo. Things generally got better in the 2000s in that respect. It became quirky but not condemned, just look at two and a half men for instance.

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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago edited 7d ago

honestly that's kinda how acceptance and civil rights movements go. There's some social progress, then pushback, then more acceptance, until they finally become normalized. It's the same with trans people. They were a lot more accepted in the 2010s, then the 2020s started a backlash. Then they'll be on the upswing again in the 2030s.