Homosexuals in Dallas, 1984

From the SMU Jones Film & Video Collection, a report by KERA, the local PBS station, on some lesbians and gay men living more or less openly in the Dallas area in 1984, and the antigay officials at Southern Methodist University who had a problem with that.  It may be hard for youngsters to realize how very different the world was back then, but just the fact of seeing real, live homos on TV was still shocking to many straight people.  

(Just so you know, SMU is a very prestigious school, often considered part of the unofficial Southern Ivy League.  It's located in the top-drawer Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas, and is home to the George W. Bush Presidential Library.)

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Disussion Question:   A commenter on this video says, "You’ve gone from, 'We’re just two people that love each other and want to be accepted' to indoctrinating kids in school with drag queen story hour." 

Frankly, I see a great big difference between responsible adults and impressionable little children. I'm not on board with the drag queen story hour idea. I say there's something very insidious about that. But I'm an old man with no power to control anybody, not even M.P. -- oh, certainly not M.P! 

What do you say?

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Growing Up Gay: Bullied but Unbroken

Insightful story by a woofy guy from my generation who came out in the 70's but led a very different life in the big city:

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Being Homosexual

I hadn't planned to run a series of gay documentaries on the Blue Truck, but I guess YouTube finally figured out that I am gay and is now pushing a lot of these in front of me.  This one is an HBO documentary, first aired in May 1984:  a very different time for gay people.  Video quality is not great, but it's watchable, and still relevant to our experience in many ways.

By the way, the gay man in the screen shot below, identified only as Tom in this video, was Dr. Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Games.

For the record:  In 1984, President Reagan was starting his fourth year in office, the word condom had never been said on television, and the AIDS crisis was a growing menace, still largely occurring in the big, far-away cities. What we had heard about it down here was damn scary, but what caused it and what to do about it were still uncertain. There were no antiviral treatments, so the diagnosis was a death sentence. The term safe sex was not yet in common parlance.  Rock Hudson's diagnosis was not made public until a year later, a few months before he died.  

If you want to revisit the plague era, here's a compilation of gay-related clips from the NBC news archives spanning the whole decade.  In some ways, it was a very different era; in others, not so much, maybe.  We still have to deal with the haters and the homophobes, who nowadays are constantly inflamed by social media and fanatical "news" channels - but at least for now, the law is on our side.  I sure hope it stays that way.

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