LittleMaya said:
Remember when being gay was the most terrifying thing the planet had to offer?
Do I. That dates me as well, I'm old...I admit it. I'm not gay, I'm not bi or hetero. I'm human. I remember.
I remember when it was socially acceptable to say the expletive equivalents of "gay' and nobody flinched; nobody dare mentioned it. Even despite certain entertainment personalities such as Elton John, Charles Nelson Reilly, Richard Simmons and so on, with their unspoken openness about it, it was never mentioned, touched upon, hinted. Hollywood hid it: the number of gay actors in the closet far outweighed the number who hinted/expressed it. And it wasn't until Rock Hudson, the last actor one would suspect was gay, came down with AIDS and died...that suddenly people took note. Robert Reed, who played Mike Brady in
The Brady Bunch, was gay, and tightly closeted. His castmember family all knew...Florence "Carol Brady" Henderson talked about it once in an interview after Reed passed away and she was visibly shaken because she knew Reed was a very good guy who happened to be gay and hid it because he lived in fear of exposure. Back then, being gay was, literally, a social death sentence. Regardless of any socioeconomic class.
And yet Hollywood hypocritically promulgated the ugliest of stereotype images of many things back then: being gay, being Hispanic (
example: the short-lived '80s ABC series A.K.A. Pablo
and other Latin actors/roles), so on...but today, the networks are totally divorced from their past as if it'd never happened and were never part of it. It's like burning down Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka and the WW2 US internment camps and then chirping "Well, since no evidence exists, it never happened". Well, thank God for MeTV, Antenna TV and other vintage networks which archive that for posterity.
I hope today's generation is paying attention to us and what we have to say. I doubt they'll consider much of it, they never saw it en masse first-hand. And the next generation? They'll be totally detached.
In closing, what saddens me about the public perception of AB/DL is they think we're "pig-wallowing-in-sh** pedophiles". Up until 45 years ago, that's how the non-gay world saw gay people. Tell me I'm wrong. I saw it firsthand.