Watch The Evolution Of The Gay Rights Movement In Under 7 Minutes
By Thoughtis
It’s hard to notice any change when you’re not exactly looking for it. Despite the “It Gets Better” campaigns and the bounty of gays gaining mainstream visibility on our TV screens, sometimes it feels like we’re crawling very slowly with gay rights. We can live comfortably in our metropolitan cities and pay high rents to decrease our chances of getting gay bashed but the rest of the country is out of luck. Some of us live in a self-inflicted bubble of gayness while others may not be so lucky. We forget that being gay in a place like New York or Seattle doesn’t exactly mean the same thing in a place like Montana.
After viewing this video, however, one gets a healthy dose of perspective and realizes that, in fact, we have come a long way in the past twenty years with gay rights. The conversations we have on this very website would be unfathomable, or at the very best, considered too fringe and casted away in the eighties. Say what you will about the merits of our generation, real change is happening right in front of your very eyes and history is being made. Videos like this remind us that we need to pay better attention to where we were and where we’re headed in the future. Growing up it was hard for me to understand that something like segregation could occur in such recent history. I can only hope that one day my children will have the same response to gay rights. “Wait, so gays weren’t allowed to get married ten years ago? What? Why? That’s so ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense!” Nope. It doesn’t. (Warning: Unless you’re made of stone or a homophobe, this video will make you weep openly.)