I've often wondered what it was like to come out in different times. The sixties being a time of sexual experimentation, was it easier or more difficult than the 70's or even the 80's? If anyone can shed some light on this area, it would be greatly appreciated.
Well, I'm not quite sure how accurate this is, but, I just read Stone Butch Blues, and from what I read, it was far from easy to come out back then.
I cant say that coming out is ever easy , it takes personal courage,although I suppose some environments can make it easier . Until fairly late in the 60's homosexual acts were a criminal act, although only for men . Sodomy was historically known in England and Wales as buggery, and is usually interpreted as referring to anal intercourse between two males or a male and a female. In England and Wales Buggery was made a felony by the Buggery Act in 1533, during the reign of Henry VIII. The punishment for those convicted was the death penalty right up until 1861. A lesser offence of "attempted buggery" was punished by 2 years of jail and some time on the pillory. In 1885, Parliament enacted the Labouchere Amendment,[12] which prohibited gross indecency between males, a broad term that was understood to encompass most or all male homosexual acts. Following the Wolfenden report, sexual acts between two adult males, with no other people present, were made legal in England and Wales in 1967, in Scotland in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982. In the 1980s and 1990s, attempts were made by gay rights organizations to equalize the age of consent for heterosexuals and homosexuals, as the age of consent for homosexuals was set at 21, while the age of consent for heterosexuals was 16. Efforts were also made to modify the "no other person present" clause so that it dealt only with minors. In 1994, Conservative MP Edwina Currie introduced an amendment to Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill which would have lowered the age of consent to 16. The amendment failed, but a compromise amendment which lowered the age of consent to 18 was accepted. Therefore the age of consent disparity remained, albeit reduced. However, the July 1, 1997 decision in the case Sutherland v. United Kingdom resulted in the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 which further reduced it to 16, and the "no other person present" clause was modified to "no minor persons present". Today, the universal age of consent is 16 in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Sexual Offences NI Order 2007 brought Northern Ireland into line with the rest of the United Kingdom in April 2008 (prior to that, the age of consent for both heterosexuals and homosexuals was 17). So a lot has changed in my lifetime, there are now support groups and online services,so hopefully the teenagers of today won't end up as screwed up as alot of my generation were / are .
it think there is a really big difference even in the last 10-15 years. i was at school in the 1990s and absolutely NOONE at my school or at any other schools i knew of came out. i get the impression it's different now. not easy or common, but much more possible. which of course is a great thing.
I came out in the 70's . It was very hard. I'm just glad things are so much better today,then it was then. There are so many programs people can join and there is actually legal marriages ,in some states now! I never thought I'd see how far we've progressed. And...things are bound to get so much better, as time goes on.
I think the general rule is that it was harder the further back you look, although lots of things have to be taken into account, like how old the person was, where they were (i.e. it would be way, way different to come out somewhere like San Francisco in the 1970s vs. Portland, Oregon in the 1970s), and who the people in their lives were at the time they came out. But yes, in Canada (and the US, too) homosexuality (really usually just male-male anal sex) was a crime until the late 1960s. And of course something we often forget is that just because a law like that gets changed doesn't mean everyone's opinions on the matter change overnight like the law. Take, for instance, gay marriage in Canada. There's going to be a huge lag time before that is taken as "normal" by the bulk of the population... probably 20 or 40 years because really, you'd have to grow up never knowing any different for the general population to not treat it as something "weird" and newfangled. Not to say everyone will eventually be okay with it but if gay mariage "existed" for your entire life, you're probably not going to find it as big a shift as it must be for people who were adults when the change happened. I think (and this may be my own coming of age bias) the biggest shift in terms of it being "okay" other than the decriminalization was in the 90s when suddenly (at least it seemed pretty sudden) it was an acceptable topic of conversation in the mainstream media and people started to say "gay and lesbian" rather than homosexual. So things like Ellen's coming out, as huge a spectacle as that was... those are the things that I think really stand out as watershed moments. Of course, a big part of why the whole "being gay" thing really started being talked about in the 90s is because of the ravages of AIDS in the 80s, so looking at history and trying to understand it by "moments" is always going to be a problematic exercise because of course there's a lot more to the world than single moments--there's the entire tapestry. One thing I think queer people tend to overlook a lot of the time is how different the rural or non-Western country experience still is from the utopian "openness" of big metropolitan regions. Outside of major cities, and definitely outside of the privileged nations with huge economies, being gay in a lot of ways is just the same as 40 years ago--and definitely worse in some countries. That's something that struck me when Brokeback Mountain came out... that story could easily have been set in the present rather than the late 60s because the day-to-day reactions and situations that the two characters faced would have been pretty similar in many respects. For an example of what I mean, consider the case of Matthew Shepard. Okay, so that was 11 years ago, but it happened in the late 1990s after a lot of the openness I'm talking about. And that was just one attack and killing that happened to capture the imagination and attention of the national news media. Things like that (beatings, killings) STILL happen all the time, even in major, gay-friendly places (Vancouver, San Francisco, etc.). So while a lot of the stuff that's happened in the last 20 or 40 years has made being gay easier for a privileged few, it's worth remembering that there are still youth (and adults) who suffer incredibly harshly for being gay. I know... I'm really super-cheery, aren't I? It's not that I don't think it's amazing and cool how far we've come--it's just that I think there's a real danger of resting on our laurels simply because our own lives are relatively easy.
