I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint.

It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle.

I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as the guy next to you. This was a thing into my 20s, as late as 2007 probably.

▲

travelalberta 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...

	▲	c-hendricks 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Different strokes and all that but I'm pretty happy it's much less socially acceptable to beat the shit out of 5-10% of the population for no reason.
	▲	stackghost 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned I don't agree with this premise at all.
	▲	wat10000 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		As long as you didn't have any gay friends or family, or just cared how other people get treated. It's not like being straight was perfect protection. You'd get abuse just for acting in ways that had been arbitrarily decided to be gay-coded. There was plenty of other bigotry to deal with as well. For example, support for interracial marriage was under 50% at the beginning of the decade (in the US), and was still under 2/3rds by the end. Bigotry is still plentiful, of course, but it was quite a bit worse then.

▲

throawaywpglib 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Its true that it wasnt as good if you were gay, and im glad that its better now.

But, its also true that it was better in many ways that affect both gay & straight people!

▲

fragglestickcar 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]