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The culture shift is stark sometimes when you watch old stuff.
On the other hand, don’t let them turn that into an excuse. You know what dealt with trans rights in a pretty honest, raw, and understanding way, in the mid 1980s? Fucking Hill Street Blues. One of the cops gets together with a woman, he’s happy to be with her, and then the other cops start giving him hell for it because she used to be a man. He gets disgusted and angry, goes over to her place, and she lectures him about it and sets him straight, tells him to figure out if he wants to be with her, but don’t try to turn who I am into some kind of thing I did to you, or make me feel bad about it. He sort of accepts it, because she clearly has a point, and that’s the end of the episode.
Hill Street Blues, man.
Yeah, I had a pretty sheltered childhood because I remember lots of good shows with a lot less of those issues. I watched a lot of sci-fi though, which IME tends to be a bit more forward-thinking. Not super surprising if you think about it
Doctor who had every type of queer back in the mid-late 2000s. From a trans “last human” to lesbian aliens
Doctor who had every type of queer back in the mid-late 2000s. From a trans “last human” to lesbian aliens
Wait, that “removed trampoline” was trans? How is that even possible with so few body parts left?
In her introduction episode she makes reference to “when I was a little boy”
She’s also a conwoman, which is kinda unfortunate and ties into upsetting stereotypes and tropes.
There’s enough examples of positive trans or otherwise characters in Doctor Who that it should be fine. You should be able to use queer characters as villains so long as them being queer isn’t part of their motivation.
I just dislike/am suspicious of a trans character whose main traits are that she is duplicitous and obsessed with unnecessary cosmetic surgeries. I’m not anti queer villains, but I bristle at stereotypes about queer individuals being used as their villainous traits.
I definitely see your point, and this might be a bit of hope posting but they did turn her around a bit. It was 2005 when she was just an evil trampoline (oh my god I think I just made a connection. Say that out loud a time or two), but then in the next season she realizes how much prettier she was before all of the surgery and how much nicer it felt to be kind. Of course, she only has this realization moments before death but I want to believe that there’s an actual positive statement in there
One of Al Pacino’s best movies, Dog Day Afternoon, is still a very relevant movie to this day and was released in 1975.
Watched Ace Ventura a few years ago for the first time since I was a kid. I remembered the whole trans reveal thing. Never put together as a kid they were implying that it was part of that character being mentally ill and completely forgot about Ace and the cops freaking out after finding out.
Yeah. It’s absolutely nuts.
In the 60s, if you were a man in a movie, you could hit women if they were getting crazy, to set them straight.
In the 80s, the heroes of movies could commit rape (Revenge of the Nerds) or child molestation (Indiana Jones) and still be the heroes of the movies.
In the 90s, the simple fact of a character being gay, or God forbid trans, was its own comedic element, without anything additional needing to be added.
Things have changed. Like changed a lot.
I like retrospective threads like this. Puts things in perspective. Growing up under conditions like that, it would have been weird if I hadn’t repressed my gender identity. Pity things couldn’t have changed earlier, and let me realize sooner.
In Pinto’s defense he did, after some soul searching, decide not to fuck the passed-out girl. Congrats, Pinto.
There’s a reason that most people consider the squeal to be the better movie.
There’s still weird shit on tv. For obvious reasons, I haven’t seen much Big Bang Theory, but that show has some weird, casual sexism.
David Milch the creator of the Deadwood series wrote and produced several episodes of Hill Street Blues.
Night Court did the same thing. The assistant D.A., Dan, has an old buddy who visits after many years and turns out they transitioned and have a boyfriend. Dan is stunned because they used to party and womanize together, but his friend said he was never actually into it. At one point Dan argues with the new boyfriend and says, “He used to be a guy!” Boyfriend says it doesn’t matter. He loves her. That episode really stuck with me, watching it as a kid.
I was going to mention this. I started watching the old night court when the new one started airing and was blown away at how well they handled that episode given the time period.
Fun fact: the term was literally invented by the British tabloid press to explain how (football superstar and husband of Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham) David Beckham could wear a sarong without being secretly gay.
I wish I was making it up but that’s genuinely the origin of the term 🤦
I watched the Beckham documentary recently and although I’m not really into football it was deplorable how the media treated DB back then and really does show how sick the media are/were.
Metrosexual 2033, Metrosexual Last Light, and Metrosexual Exodus
And the VR title, Metrosexual Awakening
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Asian dude who went to high school in the 90s.
We were constantly called metro or straight up gay because we dressed like BTS before BTS was born.
But they called us that in a hateful way.
Ya 90s high school sucked for minorities.
When I was growing up “f!!!ot” wasn’t even seen as a cuss word, it was just a burn you called your friends all the time. We didn’t really think about it until I was 16 and one of our friends came out as gay. My whole friend group kind of had it click at the same time that 1. We didn’t care that he was gay and 2. It was probably pretty fucking rude to call everything we didn’t like “g!y” and call eachother “f!g” as an insult. I think that realization happened for a lot of people who had gay friends in my generation, and it’s part of what helped lead to the level of acceptance and support the LGBT community has now.
I was the gay friend who changed my friend group’s language, and I didn’t even do it intentionally. After I came out, I had a few of my friends ask if them saying “removed” or “gay” or similar was bothering me as long as they weren’t intending it to be a slur against gay people. I just told them the honest truth:
“It doesn’t bother me, and I don’t think any less of you for using it; but I do hear it every time it’s used. It jumps out just as clear as someone saying your name in a crowded room. Every. Time.”
And that’s really all it took. Just the awareness that those kinds of words aren’t entirely meaningless. That maybe if you’re only using them to describe something negative in a general sense, then there are other words you can use that work just as well, but aren’t connected to an entire group of marginalized people.
It was kind of a funny year or so after that when they were trying to break the habit. One of them would accidentally say something and all that would happen is we would lock eyes for a second and I’d just give a small smile and a nod as if to say “You’re fine, I don’t think you’re a bigot. But yea, I heard that.”
Yeah for us we were all surprisingly progressive about it for a small town Alberta school. Like everyone in the school bar a few goofy assholes were totally fine with it and the entire school just started policing their language. It wasn’t even a big deal. But I’m sure it wad important to him and the few other kids who didn’t come out until after school.
I’m sure it didn’t go that well everywhere for everyone.
Me in the 2000s: No lotion, no conditioner, no umbrella, no scarf. Just ashy skin, nasty hair, and choking on the rain and cold.
Not because I was afraid of being made fun of, but because I was stupid and gross.
You young GenZ homies knowing how to groom are the real champs.
Wait, shorts were gay? Does that include cargo shorts? Cuz there were a lot of cargo shorts at the time.
Source: used to wear cargo shorts back then. I still do, but I used to too.
the shorts part makes no sense. everyone wears shorts
No they mean a certain type of shorts that end above the knees. Not the shorts that are basically three quarters pants. The shorter they were the gayer you’d be.
Gay:
Not gay:
Ohh, I distinctly remember that showing your knees was gay. But not as gay as bending over to pick up a pencil without bending your knees for it. It meant you wanted it up the ass then and there, there was no other conceivable reason.
Haha I learned the habit of properly lifting and not breaking your back this way. Looks like school taught me something practical after all.
unless you’re wearing running shorts in which case the length of the shorts is inversely related to how good/fast of a runner you are.
Thank god I grew up in Europe. I would’ve been gay as fuck in America.
Best part is that the “not gay” shorts look like a skirt. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The not gay ones are hella comfortable looking. Not sure about the gay ones, I’ve never really been into that type, I prefer my shorts really loose and the pockets big enough to hold 2 liter bottles
Oh, for sure. Skirts are also really comfy. Just thought it was funny given the context.
I appreciate your period-appropriate example with TJ Ford.
That’s not “gay”. Not in any circle of people I’ve ever been in. That’s rich boy yacht clothing. Especially if they are salmon colored shorts.
Yeah now it’s not. But in the late 90’s and early 2000’s it was considered that in many places where baggy shorts was the norm. Like you said it’s rich boy yacht clothing. But if you weren’t a rich preppy boy and you walked around like that in rural areas or in the inner cities people would think you ain’t straight. Good for you that the circle of people you’ve been in weren’t super homophobic.
It was only if they fell above the knees that made you gay. If they fell below the knee or were basketball shorts, you were fine.
They are comfy and easy to wear!
Well the term originated in Britain where they weren’t that popular at the time, and like the post says it was only if you wore short too much.
I can remember getting shouted at from a moving car for wearing shorts circa 2006, it was a thing.
Just people shouting invectives at you as they drove past, is that still a thing? I remembered it happening quite a bit back then, and it would ruin my day each time.
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Can’t even wear my chartreuse short-shorts with JUICY printed on the butt without people thinking I’m gay
That’s cause you need a hot pink button up with “Badman” emblazoned on the back to truly state your masculine dominance to the world.
A friend’s boyfriend has a hot pink and glittery t-shirt that says “Alpha Male” on it, which I find hilarious
Oh I need it for my band.
Basically any clothing that actually fit your build instead of being a lumpy bag was gay
I think it depended on if your shorts were above or below the knee. Cargo shorts, I want to say, are okay. I want to say that because I used to wear cargo shorts.
I used to get called gay because I rolled the sleeves up on my shirt. Also because I worked with a gay guy and occasionally had lunch with him, maybe half a dozen times a year. The odd thing is that I had a girlfriend (same one 22 years later) who these idiots knew about.
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.
Yep, we were doing so well and now look at us.
I should say doing well in terms of direction, not absolutes.
AIDS!
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.
Before we had been introduced, my wife’s BFF told her I might be gay because I like opera.
Hell the 2000’s were bad - but it was just an extension to decades, if not centuries of homophobia. Watch the first 5 minutes of Eddie Murphy’s RAW to see what was socially acceptable to say in the late 70’s, early 80’s.
In an effort to show my wife the things I loved as a kid, I put on Eddie Murphy’s stand up. The intro was brutal.
After about 15 minutes, she asked me if we can stop watching.
I been watching some movies and TV shows from the early 2000s as a nostalgia trip with my wife and man there were some terrible lessons. We talked about the homophobia and transphobia but the misogyny, body image and sexualization of teens. The skin women being called fat with the fashion that only looked good on thin thin thin women. The insistence that there was nothing worse than being a virgin. (While the schools were doing an abstinence only education BTW). The countdown clocks to when every female celebrity turned 18 everywhere. It’s surreal to think that message was everywhere.
Shallow Hal comes to mind and one of the reasons I have a difficult time enjoying Jack Black.
It’s basically everything from that time. What a weird era
y’all remember what they called white people who enjoyed hiphop
Do you mean wigga?
Listen, I just really like wigs
That was especially hilarious when I learned about the “whig” party in early US history.
“Holy shit! They were saying that back then??”
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 😭😭😭
… yeah…
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’?
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.
I have a degree in musical theatre and am a member of a music oriented fraternity. The fraternity was called “the gay” fraternity by the typical frat bro organizations within the last decade. Its not just relegated to the early part of the 2000s.
The gay theatre kid has been a stereotype forever, but they literally had to invent a word to describe guys who showered and wore something that wasn’t a T-shirt because that was enough for even women to think you were gay. The homophobia was so bad back then that you could possibly lose your job if people thought you were gay because you used hair gel and dressed well.
The 90s and 2000s were something else.
I remember how angrily people would defend themselves not being gay.
I bet you guys had far better parties
