Theres a southpark episode about this.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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The millennials spearheaded the LGBT rights, but we're also the ones who had been trans- and homophobes growing up in 90s and 00s, with or without realising it.
Character development, I guess?
We Millenials consumed Gen X made media and Gen Xer's pop cultural was very "Its fun to be cruel to weaklings and weirdos, be against consumerist modern life dweebs, and swear in front of old ladies. We're so punk."
Gen X 90's culture being all about being a renegade nihilistic slacker as a reaction to the 80's culture which was a lot more colorful, consumerist, and earnest at an almost saccharine level, even when it was trying to "rebel".
EDIT: To clarify, Millenials consumed edgelord stuff from Gen X, and homophobia was edgey.
My talent as a homophobic millennial knew no bounds in the 2000s
I'd unironically call some straight girl a raging lesbo for wearing old burkes, then jump on the GSA forum and tell some teenager "it's okay to be gay, it gets better, when I first came out you'd get bashed so things are improving" like I wasn't part of the ongoing problem....
What was wrong with us back then!?
(I was definitely transphobic AF back then too! I have no excuses for it, especially because it turns out I tick that box as well)
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This is an episode from my favorite podcast to listen to on road trips, Decoder Ring. https://open.spotify.com/episode/73XOUMOeqkFWYrCcaRMJqd This episode is about the term metrosexual.
I love this podcast. They also did an episode on truck nutz! It's just very very deep dives on random pop culture topics. And it's good journalism too, not just the C-list YouTube Video Essayist summarize-the-wikipedia-article type of stuff.
It's like you forgot that "queer eye for a straight guy" was one of the most popular shows at the time. Would have been completely unheard of just a decade earlier.
Much of the 2000's was bridge building, many people who had never even seen or met a homosexual was first introduced to the culture by shows in the 2000's. I know I was.
If the Queer Eye fans of today watched an OG episode I think they'd pass out from shock.
I was living under a rock when the new Queer Eye came out and some of the young residents at work were raving about it. The things I kept overhearing had me thinking "They can't possibly be talking about catty old Carson"
The homophobia of the 2000s paired perfectly with all the other toxic body shaming and slut shaming the media was doing at the time.
Bridge building was exactly right. It was about getting the language of "gay" into the homes of everyday people and in a tone that was happy and humerus, not divisive. Yeswere the butt of the joke, but at least it was just a joke, unlike in the years prior when it was violence.
We still have the language in the household of everyday people, but in many households the only reason the word "gay" gets brought up is for someone to spit at it and praise Trump. The happy humour is lost, the tone is shifting to vitriol and if we're not careful the next step will be violence again.
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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.
That came about partly because homosexuality in the US was legalized on June 26, 2003. Without the fear of raids, people started talking more openly about sexuality and the tide was turning slowly more positive that movies and TV shows that joined the conversation weren't immediately shut down.
Wow, I'm not American so I didn't realise Texas was holding out that long, wasn't Massachusetts offering state sanctioned marriages in like 04/05? That timeline is mind blowing! To have one state doing so much for equal rights while the other fights in court to actively do less.
I thought here in Australia, Tasmania was bad waiting until 1997 when their overseas neighbour to the north (Vic) was 1980... Then we didn't get any form of same sex marriage until 2017.
But 2003!
You have actually broken my brain with this fact...
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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.
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huh. I always just figured metrosexual just meant someone who really loved public transit.
Oh, and rape was funny. We were supposed to laugh at victims of rape, especially men being eaped in prisons, but occasionally women being raped as well.
I just watched some show from the 90s where the punchline is that the character was going to get sexually molested in a dark room. I can't believe that got a thumbs up.
You still hear a prison rape joke every now and then.
Like it's hilarious that we let wards of the State get tortured by other inmates, presumably because they "deserve" it.
Not a thought to "hmm, maybe if we're essentially sentencing someone to be raped then there's a systemic problem to be addressed," and often times "why do you love criminals so much" if you voice an opinion contrary to the accepted wisdom that they had it coming.
The only prison rape jokes I've heard in the last 10 years are about paedophiles "getting what they deserve in prison"
Which I didn't really think was a funny haha joke, just a "I don't know how to respond or fathom paedophilia, it's deeply uncomfortable and unsettling...haha"
I also personally don't know how I feel about those kinds of jokes.
The rule in comedy is never punch down, but hopefully that's where you've got to aim if you're targeting a convicted child molester, I don't think I'm better than anyone, I believe all human life has equal inherent value....but I also think I'm better than a child molester and that given control of a runaway trolley, their life has less value.
That sure is some cognitive dissonance, so cracking a joke at the expense of a paedophile in prison is easier than confronting my own opinions towards the value of human life.