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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2g5FWtn:unicornduke replied to your post “unicornduke replied to your post “The promised side-post on New York…”
Yep yep yep. Some of the stuff they say is just baffling. Like I could understand economic issues b/c rural areas didn’t really recover well from the recession. but no. lets talk about how the gays are awful. at least they don’t talk about it in front of me anymore? the tiniest blessing I guess considering the office is small and I can hear them anyway. makes me feel real safe and welcome. at this point I’m literally working there until my loans are paid and then I’m out
Oh no, that’s awful. I’m sorry you have to deal with that.
Exactly, though, on the economics thing– I can see how of course, the middle and working classes are suffering badly, I’m in there with them! Everyone I know, pretty much, has had a lot of setbacks because of the damage done to the economy– but pretty much all of it can be traced back to Reagan! So– I’m ready for someone, anyone, to start to complain to me about that, but they don’t, and it baffles me.
But as for the rest– I will say, within my adulthood, the cultural climate of at least the purple-and-blue parts of this state where I largely reside has shifted such that almost nobody says horrible things about the gays. Like, there are occasional moments here and there, but– I’m pretty invisibly bisexual, so it’s not (just) that people know not to say that shit in front of me. In mixed groups, of all ages, with people who don’t know me or my deal at all, I’ve noticed increasingly over the last decade or so that people tend to get shut down now if they say stuff like that.
(Not my dad, mind; he’s still homophobic as shit. Maybe someday I’ll feel up to trying to unpick that.)
But I admit, part of what I’m really worried about is that that will shift back. I’m so worried about that. With so much open hate at the helm of the nation and staffing its upper echelons, how much of this culture that I know is so new and so fragile will roll back? Because I’ve seen the utopia, and it’s so beautiful. I’ve been in groups where someone says something ignorant and everyone else leaps up to shut them down.
It’s so beautiful. I don’t want that to end. And I’m not even *that* queer, I could safely be closeted and live like that again.
But it’s absolutely because of the legal changes, that it has gone from something that you only discussed in certain circles and kind of gritted your teeth and smiled through elsewhere, to being just accepted. It is. In 2008 I’d flown to the UK to attend a civil partnership ceremony with my ex-girlfriend and her partner and had shocked and scandalized a number of people simply by talking about it afterward; four years later or so, gay marriage was legalized in NYS and I celebrated and talked happily about it a lot– but in some places I kept my mouth shut because I wasn’t willing to find out if someone in that group disapproved– and now I know half a dozen married same-sex couples within my intermediate circle, and it’s not in any way startling and I don’t censor myself talking about them around people whose Opinion On That I fear. It turns out that normalizing it was easy and harmonious in the end, and culture is that much richer and kinder for it.
And I mean it– even in the rural areas, the farm towns, I’m sure there are still homophobes but they mostly keep it to themselves now, because the pendulum has swung toward it being acceptable and widely practiced. And a lot of that is that the legal changes made a lot of people come out of the closet, even if they weren’t deliberately in the closet– but before, if you just talked about your partner, it wasn’t specific. Now that you can say wife, it’s not subtle anymore. It’s not hidden. It’s public record. And a lot of people who passed, willingly or not, as straight, don’t anymore. So people who assumed they didn’t know anyone gay now realize they do. And that they’ve known them for years and they’re actually cool. And the government backs them up. And.
(One of my friends who is married to a woman is a reporter for a newspaper over there in the eastern part of the state, and so a lot of people of all stripes know her, since she had a local beat. When she was getting married a few years ago, about a year after the NYS law went into effect, a lot of people, including conservative politicians, congratulated her; a few said “I don’t approve of that sort of thing but I like you” and things like that, but very few even bothered with that.)
I don’t want to lose that. God, I don’t want to lose that. I want to believe that genie can’t get shoved back into the bottle now, because it has been so thoroughly normalized– but then, I didn’t want to believe anyone could willingly embrace neo-Nazi ideology, and here we are.
Yep yep yep. Some of the stuff they say is just baffling. Like I could understand economic issues b/c rural areas didn’t really recover well from the recession. but no. lets talk about how the gays are awful. at least they don’t talk about it in front of me anymore? the tiniest blessing I guess considering the office is small and I can hear them anyway. makes me feel real safe and welcome. at this point I’m literally working there until my loans are paid and then I’m out
Oh no, that’s awful. I’m sorry you have to deal with that.
Exactly, though, on the economics thing– I can see how of course, the middle and working classes are suffering badly, I’m in there with them! Everyone I know, pretty much, has had a lot of setbacks because of the damage done to the economy– but pretty much all of it can be traced back to Reagan! So– I’m ready for someone, anyone, to start to complain to me about that, but they don’t, and it baffles me.
But as for the rest– I will say, within my adulthood, the cultural climate of at least the purple-and-blue parts of this state where I largely reside has shifted such that almost nobody says horrible things about the gays. Like, there are occasional moments here and there, but– I’m pretty invisibly bisexual, so it’s not (just) that people know not to say that shit in front of me. In mixed groups, of all ages, with people who don’t know me or my deal at all, I’ve noticed increasingly over the last decade or so that people tend to get shut down now if they say stuff like that.
(Not my dad, mind; he’s still homophobic as shit. Maybe someday I’ll feel up to trying to unpick that.)
But I admit, part of what I’m really worried about is that that will shift back. I’m so worried about that. With so much open hate at the helm of the nation and staffing its upper echelons, how much of this culture that I know is so new and so fragile will roll back? Because I’ve seen the utopia, and it’s so beautiful. I’ve been in groups where someone says something ignorant and everyone else leaps up to shut them down.
It’s so beautiful. I don’t want that to end. And I’m not even *that* queer, I could safely be closeted and live like that again.
But it’s absolutely because of the legal changes, that it has gone from something that you only discussed in certain circles and kind of gritted your teeth and smiled through elsewhere, to being just accepted. It is. In 2008 I’d flown to the UK to attend a civil partnership ceremony with my ex-girlfriend and her partner and had shocked and scandalized a number of people simply by talking about it afterward; four years later or so, gay marriage was legalized in NYS and I celebrated and talked happily about it a lot– but in some places I kept my mouth shut because I wasn’t willing to find out if someone in that group disapproved– and now I know half a dozen married same-sex couples within my intermediate circle, and it’s not in any way startling and I don’t censor myself talking about them around people whose Opinion On That I fear. It turns out that normalizing it was easy and harmonious in the end, and culture is that much richer and kinder for it.
And I mean it– even in the rural areas, the farm towns, I’m sure there are still homophobes but they mostly keep it to themselves now, because the pendulum has swung toward it being acceptable and widely practiced. And a lot of that is that the legal changes made a lot of people come out of the closet, even if they weren’t deliberately in the closet– but before, if you just talked about your partner, it wasn’t specific. Now that you can say wife, it’s not subtle anymore. It’s not hidden. It’s public record. And a lot of people who passed, willingly or not, as straight, don’t anymore. So people who assumed they didn’t know anyone gay now realize they do. And that they’ve known them for years and they’re actually cool. And the government backs them up. And.
(One of my friends who is married to a woman is a reporter for a newspaper over there in the eastern part of the state, and so a lot of people of all stripes know her, since she had a local beat. When she was getting married a few years ago, about a year after the NYS law went into effect, a lot of people, including conservative politicians, congratulated her; a few said “I don’t approve of that sort of thing but I like you” and things like that, but very few even bothered with that.)
I don’t want to lose that. God, I don’t want to lose that. I want to believe that genie can’t get shoved back into the bottle now, because it has been so thoroughly normalized– but then, I didn’t want to believe anyone could willingly embrace neo-Nazi ideology, and here we are.
