Topic to Discuss/Debate

[hkellick]

Did gays/lesbians/transgenders have more rights BEFORE the 1990s or after?
Did all the debates and arguments and parades and hatred and whatever else of the past 10+ years make life, in general, better or worse for homosexuals?
Please. Discuss.
I'll give my own $0.02 later. When I'm NOT at work. I want to hear what YOU have to say first anyways.

Comments

[phoenixsong]

Why the 90s? Why not the 60s or 70s?

Either way, I'd say after. Two words: sodomy laws.

[vissith.livejournal.com]

How about before 1900?

[tabsl33tdicebag.livejournal.com]

After. I know at least that in the area I live, transgendered people are protected by an anti-hate-crime law, which is more than can be said for everywhere.


However I am also mch more aware of the injustice against transgendered people in specific that spans EVEN across the GLB(t) community... I remember that I could never make use of the local GLBT youth centre (the attic) because the non-transgendered people (Mostly gay males (I'm not prejudiced, they attacked me)) would not stop harassing me. I was constantly subjected to even worse ridicule than I had been in GRADE SCHOOL for goodness sakes.

I am also more aware of discrimination and the lengths that individual people go to to marginalise the rights that the law has seen fit to give us..... And we're still considered second-class citizens by most, some of them even in government, although at the very lleast I know a good loophope that would allow me to marry my beloved partner (currently of the same physical sex.. But there will be a window of opportunity when that is not so..)

I dunno. I've seen the situation improve for my born-in-gender homosexual friends, but its still extremely hard to live liffe as a transsexual as far as discrimination goes. I am a pacifist, but if I didn't carry a weapon, I'd be dead -_-

[blackfelicula.livejournal.com]

I don't think legal rights have changed much for or against. I think that sexual diversity and gender diversity are getting more of the spotlight at present, having increased since the early gay rights movements, I think in the 1970s and 1980s. Still the media conveniently forgets that not all those affected by sexual and gender rights are gay or lesbian.

Bisexuals may "have the best of both worlds", but we're subject to biphobia from straight and gay alike or outright marginalized. I'm not transsexual, hermaphroditic, a transvestite, or androgynous, but rarely do we hear viewpoints from any of the above when people are talking about "gay rights".

I think that if gay rights have indeed lessened, it would be more thanks to George W. Bush and his religious right cronies who have more to do with it. I'm hearing more political groups rally against gay rights with the current faith-based-politics that have been going around.