cultural change

Once upon a time In the winter of 1993, my brother came from Michigan to go to grad school in western Massachusetts. My mother wanted to use the last shreds of my father's employee discount plan (my father had been a Ford employee for decades, until his death a few years earlier), to help him get a car. Nobody, including my brother, was crazy about the idea of him driving an unfamiliar car from Ann Arbor to Amherst. In January. When all his Michigan friends had already started school. So he and my mother went to a Ford dealer in Michigan and ordered a car to be delivered to a dealer near my home in Troy, NY. He could fly into Albany, have a few days visiting with me and my husband, pick up the car, make sure it was ok, and only have about 100 miles to drive to Amherst. There was enough slack in the schedule for him to wait out a few days of bad weather. And if the car wasn't ready, we could drive him to Amherst and make other arrangements in a few weeks, after he was more settled.

As you may recall, back in the winter of 1993, the media was paying a lot of attention to the question of whether gays should serve in the US military. (I'm talking about the extremely heated disputes that were supposed to be resolved by the "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue" policy. Though that turned out not to work very well, either as policy (HR or PR) or as a way to make the dispute go away.) I'm sure you know how a hot topic in the media tends to saturate public space, especially public spaces that have radio or TV on in the background. Like the waiting areas in airports and hospitals. And car dealerships.

My husband drove my brother to the car dealer, to get the car. (They went when I was in class, because they both knew how much I like driving around and dealing with cars.) So I heard about this after they came home. While the salesman was sorting out the paperwork, the TV in the waiting area showed some kind of hearing or commentary, talking about how gays had been in the military in the past and done a good job, only disclosing their orientation years later. And the salesman started talking about how he knew there hadn't been any obscenity obscenity [homosexuals] obscenity on his ship, when he was in the Navy, because all the decent guys would have cut off their obscenity obscenities and thrown them over the side. Another salesman, who had just driven the car over from an outlying lot, came in and joined the conversation, agreeing that his unit in Vietnam would have mutilated and killed any among them they suspected of being inadequately heterosexual. Obviously, any proper soldiers would, and that's why it was crazy to talk about letting those obscenities enlist.

I'm not just pointing out that the car salesmen thought that way, or that they didn't hesitate to say such things out loud in public (presumably while sober), while getting no encouragement from their audience. I think it's noteworthy that salesmen didn't hesitate to talk that way in front of customers. Not even when the customers are two young men who walk in together, and don't hint at a positive response.

I don't think it would happen now. The territory of debate has shifted too much. It was a little later in 1993 when I first started hearing about same-sex marriage as a political issue. There was a court case in Hawaii which seemed to inspire more "defense of marriage" resistance than all the domestic partnership contracts and commitment ceremonies in the country. At the time, I thought it was all a distraction from more important priorities. I thought the gay-bashing we needed to fight was mostly stuff that got people fired or evicted, or beaten up on the street. I worried that focus on marriage rights would make other rights seem trivial, or just invisible. (Last year, or perhaps the year before, I saw something along those lines on LJ, posted by somebody I regard as sensible, kind, and moderately liberal. She didn't see why gay rights would matter to somebody who did not have, or seek, a partner they wanted to marry. It's sad but not surprising to hear that from liberal college students, who I don't expect to have much perspective. But this woman was old enough to *remember* the 1980s and '90s.) I didn't realize how much the marriage controversy would force the debate from "is it ok to tolerate gays at social fringes?" to "is it ok to exclude gays from mainstream respectability?" Just talking about the latter question changes the answer to the former. There is still a lot of heated opposition to gay rights, but it's been years since I heard anybody actually advocating anti-gay hate crime. Most people speaking against same-sex marriage, or adoption rights, or the right to serve in the military, try to explain they don't dislike homosexuals a bit and don't want to hurt them. My point is not about their personal sincerity, but about what they think is socially acceptable to say in public.