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Though on the subject of Stonewall...

I once was having a conversation with a gay friend of mine, and he joked that for some conservatives, gay marriage might be their final revenge - that they'd force gay people into the suburban white-picket-fence mould of the idealised het couple. Now, he was joking - he was delighted that marriage equality was a thing - but it got me thinking.

What would it take to have a kind of fusion between the OP and gay rights? Like: a world where there's the 50s ideal of no sex before marriage, but there's full sexual equality, and there's LGBT marriage equality too. Basically, a world where being openly LGBT is just fine, but where gay and straight people have to live in that nuclear family suburbia set-up, just instead of it always being husband-wife-kids-dog it can be husband-husband-kids-dog or wife-wife-kids-cat (apologies for the stereotyping there :p ).

Could that be a thing, at least for a while, do we think? And would people who don't necessarily think of the OTL sexual revolution with fondness be happy with a set-up like that?
 
I mean, hell - it used to be thought that women couldn't enjoy sex. That was something doctors actually said. The dispelling of that myth alone is a highly positive outcome of a more open sexual culture.

But that's not something only discovered by a sexually liberal culture. For example, going back to the Puritans vs Victorians, there was plenty about it in that culture being for both spouses. In one sense, I can see it as being "liberal" for the times, but in another, it was far more conservative towards its expectations of men than the surrounding society. With Victorianism, you saw a big backlash against the decadence of the Regency period, but I think if Victoria had grieved differently for Albert and some of the social mores been different, you might have seen pushback from the Church against the sterile misogyny of Victorian medicine in regards to sex. Within Catholic circles, some definite imbalance

Re: divorce

Puritan love . . . was not so much the cause as it was the product of marriage. It was the chief duty of husband and wife toward each other, but it did not necessarily form a sufficient reason for marriage. . . . The advice was not that couples should not marry unless they love each other but that they should not marry unless they can love each other. (Morgan, Edward. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England [1944; Harper & Row, 1966], 54)

Also, on a strictly cultural basis in some more traditional cultures like India, there are a lot of semi-arranged marriages or at least arranged introductions where this concept of marry, then love is strongly present.

Here's a fascinating example of conservative sexuality, from a Puritan Lady as the epitaph to her late husband at their church:

Epitaph on the monument of Sir William Dyer at Colmworth by Lady Catherine Dyer

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay
One hour longer: so that we might either
Sit up, or gone to bed together?
But since thy finished labour hath possessed
Thy weary limbs with early rest,
Enjoy it sweetly, and thy widow bride
Shall soon repose her by thy slumbering side,
Whose business now is only to prepare
My nightly dress and call to prayer.
Mine eyes wax heavy, and the day grows old,
The dew falls thick, my blood grows cold,
Draw, draw the closed curtains and make room,
My dear, my dearest dust, I come, I come.
 
Though on the subject of Stonewall...

What would it take to have a kind of fusion between the OP and gay rights? Basically, a world where being openly LGBT is just fine, but where gay and straight people have to live in that nuclear family suburbia set-up, just instead of it always being husb revolution with fondness be happy with a set-up like that?

I think it would be possible.

1. Cultural monogamy for both men and women. Running off with a "younger woman/your sexretary" is seen as just as bad as a woman sleeping with the next door neighbor. Same for "sowing wild oats."

2. Adoption of a child (less likely surrogacy) is extremely valued and has been for generations. For example, imagine an infertile Royal Family adopting and elevating several children to become "Royal." Rinse and repeat the process at all levels of society.

3. It'd probably have to be a non-Judeo Christian culture, or you'd need a much more liberal hand much earlier. Alternately, you might see a heavily Christian culture focus on the two people and covenant and severely punish and discourage sexual activity outside monogamy (premarital sex as a sort of exception if it happened "a little early" to marriage). You really need number 2 to make 3 work for a same sex marriage in a sexually conservative culture.
 
@Theoretical_TJ - That's actually really interesting. Cheers for sharing! I knew that things had yo-yo'd, but I didn't know that the Puritans had seen it as important for both spouses.

And yeah: that idea of marriage then love - or at least, mutual respect, etc. - was very prevalent in Japanese marriage too. The ideal, anyway.

I think it would be possible.

-Snip-

Interesting. Certainly, the man-woman double standard would have to end. And I can definitely see how valuing adoption would help.

Which, on a tangent, would also have given orphans far better lives than in OTL history. A lot of orphans only got adopted to be an extra set of working hands around the place (see Anne of Green Gables, Little Town on the Prairie for examples of that kind of carry-on in the past - very jarring to see casually mentioned in kids' books). But I can definitely see how adoption being normalised from early on would help to see same-sex couples be seen as the nucleus of a 'normal' family.
 
Not without MAJOR ASBs, the US staying out of WW2, and the New Deal partly or totally failing/being stopped. Also Vietnam would almost certainly have to not occur; the rise in social liberalism had some ties to the counterculture movement's rise, and the counterculture movement got a big boost from the unpopularity of Vietnam. Pretty difficult to achieve without setting up a very different WW2 at the minimum
 
Not without MAJOR ASBs, the US staying out of WW2, and the New Deal partly or totally failing/being stopped. Also Vietnam would almost certainly have to not occur; the rise in social liberalism had some ties to the counterculture movement's rise, and the counterculture movement got a big boost from the unpopularity of Vietnam. Pretty difficult to achieve without setting up a very different WW2 at the minimum

And even then, it'd only really delay it.

I mean: if we're talking about more 'lax' attitudes to sex, we'd already seen the ice breaking in the 1920s, particularly in the United States and in Weimar Germany. And Weimar Germany had already seen more tolerance given to being gay; Denmark and Sweden legalised it over the course of the 1930s and 1940s... And of course, both world wars saw women taking up the slack on the home front, thus giving them more representation in the work place.

While the shape that it took was mutable, I think that at its basic heart - gender equality, greater acceptance for sex outside marriage, gay rights - were always going to be coming. Without Vietnam, you might have seen that later certainly, but I doubt you could stop it entirely.

Especially since, while this might seem self-evident, we must remember that America is not the world.* As I said above, as one example: Denmark and Sweden were both ahead of the posse in gay rights. I can certainly see a situation sans Vietnam where America sees continued '50s-style puritanism for longer, but the sexual revolution still happens in Europe.

*Not aimed at you personally there, Worf :D Just noting that throughout most of the conversation - this includes me - things had mostly focused on the American experience. When there's a whole rest of the world to consider, a rest of the world where progressive stuff had been happening a fair bit before America :p
 
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