DBWI Gay marriage not legalized during the 80s

[theg*ddam*hoi2fan]

Most of the countries didn't start following America's lead for a while.

Oh, very true. Scandinavia was being its normal exceptional self But of course, the slowness in following America's lead was what led a lot of die-hard fundamentalist American preachers to decamp to Germany. And then get busy in the East after the Wall came down It's also what led William 'Lunatic' Lind to write that insane novel about German Christians 'liberating' the United States from 'homosexual tyranny'

EDIT: I watched a video of Thatcher's face when she realized what Reagan had done. It looked like she was about to have a seizure right there. I don't really like Reagan but I'll admit that the fact that we was able to legalize Same-Sex Marriage in his time is an achievement in itself, nevermind that it became such an accepted part of Western Life thanks to his inititatives.

She did alright

Very true. He's proof that no person is ever one thing only. Was he a hardline fiscal conservative who laid the foundations for significant financial problems? Yes. But he also blazed the trail on a major civil rights issue

OOC: Wasn't trying to contradict anything with Scandinavia incidentally - it just occurred to me that given their good track record in the area...

 

[The Poarter]

Oh, very true. Scandinavia was being its normal exceptional self But of course, the slowness in following America's lead was what led a lot of die-hard fundamentalist American preachers to decamp to Germany. And then get busy in the East after the Wall came down It's also what led William 'Lunatic' Lind to write that insane novel about German Christians 'liberating' the United States from 'homosexual tyranny'



She did alright

Very true. He's proof that no person is ever one thing only. Was he a hardline fiscal conservative who laid the foundations for significant financial problems? Yes. But he also blazed the trail on a major civil rights issue

OOC: Wasn't trying to contradict anything with Scandinavia incidentally - it just occurred to me that given their good track record in the area...

Meh. Twenty countries ended up legalizing Same-Sex Marriage by turn of the millenium. I think the number of countries to have it has doubled since then. Haven't really kept track of it for the most part although I do know that a stipulation for joining the European Union is that all its members must have same-sex marriage. Not so sure about other major organizations though.

Also yeah. Finland is the most conservative of all Scandanavian countries so it took them a while.

As for Thatcher ... well it must have really sucked giving an interview on the BBC on the hour it had just been announced.

By the way does anyone know what was the reactions for Canada specifically? I'm trying to look it up but I can't really get any good in-depth articles on it other than the fact that it was legalized in 1990. How did Canada react for the most part?

 

[overoceans]

OOC...

Poarter wrote:

EDIT: I watched a video of Thatcher's face when she realized what Reagan had done. It looked like she was about to have a seizure right there. I don't really like Reagan but I'll admit that the fact that we was able to legalize Same-Sex Marriage in his time is an achievement in itself, nevermind that it became such an accepted part of Western Life thanks to his inititatives.

Thatcher was one of the supporters of decriminalizing homosexuality in the UK back when that issue was settled in the 1960s. In her autobiography, she said that what she later objected to was school curricula etc that seemed designed to encourage "confused youth"(or some such terminology) to become gay. Which could be right-wing religious paranoia("They're after our kids!!!"), but maybe just textbook libertarianism("the state has no business getting involved in sex one way or another"), depending on the person making the argument.

So I wonder what she thought about gay marriage, since that doesn't really involve intervening in anyone's life, just giving an option to people who already identify as gay. I do know she was pretty hardcore pro-choice(vetoed proposed laws which set the cutoff for abortion too early), so I don't think she was overly beholden to any sort of Religious Right agenda.

 

[The Poarter]

Does anyone remember how Canada reacted to the announcement? I was born in 1996 so I don't have first hand knowledge of it. Or when Canada legalized it in 1990.

Does anyone here remember?

 

[James Ricker]

Donald Trump wouldn't have the best man at Roy Cohn's wedding.

 

[The Poarter]

By the way guys who's your favorite gay character in fiction? I am stuck between Rawls in The Wire and Cody from Total Drama. Anyone else have their favorite gay characters?

 

[theg*ddam*hoi2fan]

By the way guys who's your favorite gay character in fiction? I am stuck between Rawls in The Wire and Cody from Total Drama. Anyone else have their favorite gay characters?

Korrasami Julian Bashir from DS9 - his relationship with Garak was one of the deepest and most complex in TV history.* And Batwoman. When she and Maggie Sawyer finally tied the knot - in both the comics and the series** - I was a very happy fan

* OOC: With the more open atmosphere, the DS9 producers ITTL decide to go with the actors' idea and make Bashir and Garak an actual couple.
** OOC: ITTL As well as Supergirl, Batwoman gets a TV series.

 

[overoceans]

Does anyone remember how Canada reacted to the announcement? I was born in 1996 so I don't have first hand knowledge of it. Or when Canada legalized it in 1990.

Does anyone here remember?

Prime Minister Turner, normally pro-American and socially liberal, was convinced by some of his backroom hacks to issue an anti-American, anti-gay response, in order to appeal to the lingering remnants of old-style, small-t tory nationalism in Canada. He also tried to make it an issue in the subsequent election("...the fight of my life is now for the survival of the Canadian family..."), but to little avail. He lost, and eventually ended up on the board of directors of a few large corporations, including one that pioneered gay employee benefits in Canada.

(OOC: A send-up of the otherwise pro-business Turner's anti-American, anti-free trade campaign in the 1988 election. Though right-wing tory-style anti-Americanism was a real thing at one point in Canada, see George Grant's Lament For A Nation.)

 

[thekingsguard]

By the way guys who's your favorite gay character in fiction? I am stuck between Rawls in The Wire and Cody from Total Drama. Anyone else have their favorite gay characters?

Either Jack Harkness from Doctor Who, or Yin Yang from The Expendables. I may give it to yang, because I love how the gang gives each other grief, and how the only joke at Yang's expence for being gay is Hale Caesar being the only one not knowing Yang was married and had kids.

 

[The Poarter]

Korrasami Julian Bashir from DS9 - his relationship with Garak was one of the deepest and most complex in TV history.* And Batwoman. When she and Maggie Sawyer finally tied the knot - in both the comics and the series** - I was a very happy fan

* OOC: With the more open atmosphere, the DS9 producers ITTL decide to go with the actors' idea and make Bashir and Garak an actual couple.
** OOC: ITTL As well as Supergirl, Batwoman gets a TV series.

Yeah. Jean Chretien did legalize it. Must have been very weird for the Catholic Church at the time. Looking into the history a bit more I've learnt that several churches split over this issue including the Catholic church in Canada.

As for why I like Rawls well he's a pretty realistic character as well. Especially for someone made in the 1990s. We don't get an in your face that he's gay moment but we do see several scenes showing he is. Like when he appeared at the police officers ball with his husband or when he called out Lima for not being their for her son, another lesbian on the show.

Cody was a long haul. It took four seasons kg outright character development but that' it made sense. Her practically a different person by the end off the series.

 

[The Poarter]

Anyone remember when the first Muslim country legalized ssm? Or Japan?

 

[Lost Freeway]

Anyone remember when the first Muslim country legalized ssm? Or Japan?

You mean Indonesia? That lasted all of six months before popular outcry led to it being overturned.

Indeed, relations between the Muslim world and the West have only worsened due to Western attitudes towards homosexuality.

 

[theg*ddam*hoi2fan]

Anyone remember when the first Muslim country legalized ssm? Or Japan?

Japan don't have SSM. However, the Tokyo government has recognised civil partnerships throughout the wards of Tokyo.

Indeed, relations between the Muslim world and the West have only worsened due to Western attitudes towards homosexuality.

Yes and no...fundamentalist preachers fulminate against it regularly, but most Muslim governments couldn't care less about what western countries legalise as long as we keep trading with them. Relations between the West and the major Middle Eastern oil-producing nations still follow the same rule: they don't criticise Western 'vice', we don't criticise the things we don't like in their nations, we buy oil, everyone's happy.

Mind you, though, there's a good few liberal imams in Europe who perform same-sex marriages*. The fundamentalists hate them of course, but they persevere, as do the people who go to them for weddings.

*OOC: There are at least a couple OTL - with this POD, there'd be more.

Also: while I can see it being something the fundamentalists dislike...a country granting gay rights isn't something that causes worsening of relations, as long as said country doesn't try to push it on other countries. Especially not with trade involved.

 

[The Poarter]

Japan don't have SSM. However, the Tokyo government has recognised civil partnerships throughout the wards of Tokyo.

Which is basically another name for marriage mind you. Japan for the most part recognizes foreign Same-Sex Marriage for the most part and has some weird form of national partnerships i.e. Civil Unions.

 

[The Poarter]

Current World Map of where Same-Sex Marriage is Legal:

https://imgur.com/a/ZZEPS

 

[The Poarter]

OOC: I wonder what's up with Russia in this world.

 

[Ancien Regime]

I do have to wonder what the effect on pop culture would have been. OTL, we've seen increasing prominence of L and G characters in films, TV shows and video games since the 80s (even if it's taken until more recently to have many B and T).

Some people have complained that the kind of gay characters we see in mainstream media are 'painfully normal' but quite often that's not a problem - they're almost always fully rounded characters who just happen to be gay. Without the OTL move towards normalisation we might just have seen token characters whose only character feature is being gay.

The "more recently" really only applies to Western media, for whatever reason, once LGBT was normalized in the states, Japan took it and RAN, especially with trans people. There are trans people all over Japanese video games, ranging from Samus and Birdo (who was inspired by an unnamed trans artist who worked on the original Super Mario Bros) to Cecil/Cecillia in FF4 (who goes from a male Dark Knight to a female Paladin), in fact it was a huge trend in the 90s for Japan to add more and more trans characters to mainstream games, and don't get me started on anime (literally EVERY moeblob anime has at least one trans girl in it these days, and having Homura be a trans lesbian really made the Madoka story more poignant because Madoka was the first girl to accept Homura *as a girl* because of the transphobia she faced overseas in Russia - with that said Japanese culture can be a bit creepy and fetishizing vis-a-vis trans people especially trans girls, like, calling trans women "traps" would NEVER fly in trans friendly spaces in the USA)

 

[Neoteros]

I remember when gay marriage was legalized here, Pope John Paul II really didn't like it.

Korrasami Julian Bashir from DS9 - his relationship with Garak was one of the deepest and most complex in TV history.* And Batwoman. When she and Maggie Sawyer finally tied the knot - in both the comics and the series** - I was a very happy fan

* OOC: With the more open atmosphere, the DS9 producers ITTL decide to go with the actors' idea and make Bashir and Garak an actual couple.
** OOC: ITTL As well as Supergirl, Batwoman gets a TV series.

Best. Ship. Ever.

They spent the first two seasons going through the typical "will they or won't they?" phase a lot of TV couples go through, but in the last two seasons they were a full on couple; the way Asami stood by Korra's side when she was suffering from depression and having suicidal tendencies, well, it's one of the best things about the show. And their implied sex scene in the last season makes that Sokka/Suki scene in the first series seem subtle.

 

[The Poarter]

I remember when gay marriage was legalized here, Pope John Paul II really didn't like it.

I find it really funny how the Pope and the Catholic Church is struggling to fit same se marriage into their world view because even conservative Christians in America refuse to be part of a church where it's not legaL. You basically have rednecks forming their own churches, with the only difference being it allows gay marriage.

 

[Neoteros]

I find it really funny how the Pope and the Catholic Church is struggling to fit same se marriage into their world view because even conservative Christians in America refuse to be part of a church where it's not legal. You basically have rednecks forming their own churches, with the only difference being it allows gay marriage.

The difference between the US and Europe is, gay marriage was introduced in the US by Reagan, a conservative, but in Europe - Catholic and Orthodox Europe, at least - it's always been a left wing issue, due to the clergy being largely opposed to it. This is why in the US, you have a Republican Party that supported gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana while being shockingly regressive on economic issues, and a Democratic Party that's almost socialist when it comes to economics but is otherwise moralistic and strait-laced.

Hell, the Democrats got the fucking Mormons on board, in the last couple of decades. Utah's so blue it's insane.

It wouldn't surprise me if Bernie Sanders or another politician on the far left of the Democrats were to dismiss homosexuality as "bourgeois decadence" behind closed doors... people like him would be booted from any left wing European party.