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> As bad as that was, in the past you could move to another of the 380,000 towns on this planet. 1. That assumes you have the money to move, can land in a new
by SavantIdiot 5y ago
> As bad as that was, in the past you could move to another of the 380,000 towns on this planet.
1. That assumes you have the money to move, can land in a new city and find housing, and then find a job. Pre-internet this was absolutely nontrivial.
2. It's not 380,000 towns on this planet, in the 80's/90's it was just a handful of cities that were more evolved, like San Francisco or P Town. There's a reason those cities are so LGBTQ heavy.
- Darmody 5y agoI just want to point out that people moved without any money back in the day. Now we play it safe. We save money. We find an apartment, a job and then we move. We live comfortably now and we don't want to lose that when moving. You can even see it today with people from certain parts of the world. They leave with nothing else than maybe a 20 dollar phone hoping they'll be able to call their family once they get somewhere.
- dillondoyle 5y agoBut queer people don't always have families, especially back in the day. So many were kicked out, ostracized, cut off. RuPaul is correct when she says queer people create their own family. Even today.
- Darmody 5y agoI was purely talking about moving to another place.
- dillondoyle 5y agoyou specifically said 'hoping they'll be able to call their family once they get somewhere.'
- seneca 5y agoAnd that has almost nothing to do with the actual point they were making.
- Darmody 5y agoOh god, do I really have to explain that part? I gave an example of how some people move to another country with only a 20 dollar phone. I could've said with 20 dollars in their pockets or with a couple t-shirts in a bag. You're supposed to be smart people and...nevermind, I deleted what I wrote because it's not worth it. It's increasingly difficult to talk to leftists on the internet, they take the most meaningless comment as an attack or a literal fact and they they try to downvote you or argue stupid things. Not worth my time.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Godel_unicode 5y agoPeople also crossed oceans in tiny wooden boats that sunk without a survivor on a regular basis.
- dillondoyle 5y agoAND queer people have always struggled to gain access to workplaces. Even today income lags & opportunities are hindered by bias The history of drag balls and specially the category of business executive is a great example of how the only access to so many professions was performative art and impersonation (& still is especially for POC, non normative gender, trans etc)
- uniqueid 5y agoI'm 'yes, but...' on both those points. (1) is true, but I was thinking more about the persecution aspect than the community aspect. If being gay made life unbearable in a particular town, it was at least physically possible, if expensive, for a person to cross state-lines and start life fresh. Today people leave a trail that follows them globally and for a lifetime. In terms of community, (2) is a little more bleak than the reality. I'm guessing in the 1980s, most college towns had at least a gay bar (or cafe, bookshop, whatever), and community formed around it.
- monocasa 5y agoI don't know about your (2) argument. There's a lot of college towns even today that don't have gay bars. I've lived in Boulder, CO (CU Boulder) and Athens, GA (UGA) and neither really have a gay bar. In the 1980s? Only the major metros really.
- uniqueid 5y agoI don't have any statistics, but there may well be fewer brick-and-mortar gay hang-outs today, precisely because the internet has given people other ways to meet.
- monocasa 5y agoThere hasn't ever been a gay bar in either of those towns AFAIK, so my point still stands. And that includes 'The People's Republic of Boulder'.