09-30-2012, 11:10 PM
Disclaimer: I was born in late 1982. How it LOOKS to me is a combination of factors.
One, prosperity allowed people to focus on things other than where their next meal was coming from and gave them extra time for THINKING. All those appliances (starting in the early 20th century) also gave women extra free time to start organizing as well. And once blacks started getting their civil rights then everyone else looked to them and said they should be equal as well, including gays.
In the 70s feminism became especially angry at how many of the other groups seeking liberation (from blacks to hippies) treated them and went really insane. I'm not saying I blame them, from what Granny told me I might've been acting out that way myself back then as it was mind boggling intolerable (at least any woman who retained any self-respect having grown up in such a world). This led to some radical challenging of gender roles which, I think, had the unintended (if welcome) consequence of becoming more accepting of gays (especially after the reactionary feminism was met in I think the 80s with an equally reactionary pro-sex feminism which embraced alternative sexualities and perhaps would've been more accurately called a sex liberation movement and created the paradigm that eventually lead to things like The Sex Party). Radical feminism in the 70s also embraced lesbianism though it sounds more political to me rather than true lesbianism (and they had a tendency at the time to reject gay men as "hating women"), but that would inevitably contribute further to reevaluation of sexuality right along with gender roles.
And the reactionary Christian fundamentalist response against hippies, feminism, etc, would only encourage those marketing to the new boomer generation (who were now a huge market) with new idols who rebelled by becoming everything those conservatives feared (and thus appealing to the kids) and so we got women sometimes looking more like men (Joan Jett had a masculine feel to me when I see her early stuff on YT) and a great many men who spent more on their hair & face than your average woman (especially in "hair metal")...heck, when I saw some 80s cassette in a thrift store of Poison I thought it was a band of drag queens! Though apparently not gay friendly at the time it couldn't help but challenge gender roles (and thus orientation) even further.
And in the background was LSD, mescaline, etc. This didn't affect everyone (some just partied on it without any appreciable long term change in perspective), others drowned in it, but it also became a fad to tune in, turn on, drop out, and people would continue to do so after it went out of style (I personally believe that the main reason they're illegal is because they're a threat to the paradigm that supports TPTB). Though few people know it there have always been those who questioned society, rejected war & dogma, embraced feminism, racial equality, and acceptance of homosexuality, but they'd always been a small subculture with only a few small sanctuaries in the world until the late 60s when those views suddenly gained mainstream attention. Having played with such drugs myself I know how they can radically shift your perspective and that even once when you return to normal reality the experience lingers and influences you for a long time to come. Having so many people who's reality were so shaken up led to, I believe, a questioning of assumptions that contributed to the fight for civil rights, acceptance of change, and also for a more lucid way to learn about the self (the more mundane ways to free one's mind that seemed to become popular in the 70s).
And another background role, I believe, is that the boomers made it so that kids significantly outnumbered their parents AND society had changed so that "when you're 18 you're out the door" which led to a lot more youth (now influenced more by peers than stuffy mentors) questioning what they were raised with in a world where so many once radical notions had become easily available to the mainstream (only a few are radical, but they still had their influence on a great many others).
Anyway, that's off the top of my head.
One, prosperity allowed people to focus on things other than where their next meal was coming from and gave them extra time for THINKING. All those appliances (starting in the early 20th century) also gave women extra free time to start organizing as well. And once blacks started getting their civil rights then everyone else looked to them and said they should be equal as well, including gays.
In the 70s feminism became especially angry at how many of the other groups seeking liberation (from blacks to hippies) treated them and went really insane. I'm not saying I blame them, from what Granny told me I might've been acting out that way myself back then as it was mind boggling intolerable (at least any woman who retained any self-respect having grown up in such a world). This led to some radical challenging of gender roles which, I think, had the unintended (if welcome) consequence of becoming more accepting of gays (especially after the reactionary feminism was met in I think the 80s with an equally reactionary pro-sex feminism which embraced alternative sexualities and perhaps would've been more accurately called a sex liberation movement and created the paradigm that eventually lead to things like The Sex Party). Radical feminism in the 70s also embraced lesbianism though it sounds more political to me rather than true lesbianism (and they had a tendency at the time to reject gay men as "hating women"), but that would inevitably contribute further to reevaluation of sexuality right along with gender roles.
And the reactionary Christian fundamentalist response against hippies, feminism, etc, would only encourage those marketing to the new boomer generation (who were now a huge market) with new idols who rebelled by becoming everything those conservatives feared (and thus appealing to the kids) and so we got women sometimes looking more like men (Joan Jett had a masculine feel to me when I see her early stuff on YT) and a great many men who spent more on their hair & face than your average woman (especially in "hair metal")...heck, when I saw some 80s cassette in a thrift store of Poison I thought it was a band of drag queens! Though apparently not gay friendly at the time it couldn't help but challenge gender roles (and thus orientation) even further.
And in the background was LSD, mescaline, etc. This didn't affect everyone (some just partied on it without any appreciable long term change in perspective), others drowned in it, but it also became a fad to tune in, turn on, drop out, and people would continue to do so after it went out of style (I personally believe that the main reason they're illegal is because they're a threat to the paradigm that supports TPTB). Though few people know it there have always been those who questioned society, rejected war & dogma, embraced feminism, racial equality, and acceptance of homosexuality, but they'd always been a small subculture with only a few small sanctuaries in the world until the late 60s when those views suddenly gained mainstream attention. Having played with such drugs myself I know how they can radically shift your perspective and that even once when you return to normal reality the experience lingers and influences you for a long time to come. Having so many people who's reality were so shaken up led to, I believe, a questioning of assumptions that contributed to the fight for civil rights, acceptance of change, and also for a more lucid way to learn about the self (the more mundane ways to free one's mind that seemed to become popular in the 70s).
And another background role, I believe, is that the boomers made it so that kids significantly outnumbered their parents AND society had changed so that "when you're 18 you're out the door" which led to a lot more youth (now influenced more by peers than stuffy mentors) questioning what they were raised with in a world where so many once radical notions had become easily available to the mainstream (only a few are radical, but they still had their influence on a great many others).
Anyway, that's off the top of my head.
![[-]](https://gayspeak.com/images/duende_v3_local/collapse.png)
