Gay Changes Since 1985

There’s no mistaking that a great deal has changed for gay Americans since 1985. I’ve witnessed them all myself first hand, and I’ve seen the impact of what lead to many of these changes in only the past five years or so. Just in publishing alone I’m often stunned at how much has changed. In the year 2000 there were a handful of small indie LGBT publishers and only a handful of published openly gay authors. If you wanted to query an agent with gay content you didn’t look to see if the agent represented LGBT authors or books. You simply looked for the category: Gay/Lesbian. Period. And even if you found an agent who repped Gay/Lesbian, good luck to that agent in shopping a gay book to any of the large publishers.

This article talks about 8 things that gay people can do now they couldn’t do in l985. Then it mentions 7 things they still can’t do. So even though a lot has changed, there’s still discrimination out there.

6. Visit A Same-Sex Spouse In The Hospital
In 2010, President Obama ordered that hospitals receiving Medicare and Medicaid payments must grant patients the right to designate whom can visit and consult with them, enabling hospital visitation rights for same-sex couples.

This one is questionable, because if you were a gay couple in 2007 and you were responsible enough to get all your legal paperwork in order with power of attorney and living wills, you did have legal rights, full control, and full same sex spouse hospital visitation. Please don’t argue this point with me because I’ve posted about this before in several places, I personally went through this with Tony, and with my attorney and my legal papers I didn’t have one single issue when Tony was hospitalized for three months. And frankly, I think all married couples, gay or straight, should make sure all their legal paperwork is up to date and on hand in case of an emergency. You never know.

Here’s another thing that still affects gay people and hasn’t changed since 1985:

7. Be Served By All Businesses
It is still legal in many states for a business to refuse service to LGBT people because of a lack of laws protecting against discrimination in public accommodations, including housing.

The rest of these are worth reading. I didn’t know about the one above. You can get there from here.

Gay Bigot of the Year

There’s an award called The Gay Bigot of the Year, and this year’s recipient probably won’t surprise most people. In fact, I think it’s a little too obvious and awards like this should be given to others who seem to slip through those proverbial cracks unscathed for being as bigoted, if not worse. In other words, at least this guy is honest about his bigotry, like him or not, agree with him or not, and I doubt he really cares one way or the other.

In any event, at least there is an award for this, and it did go to someone who has never supported gays: Pat Robertson. It’s just that I never take people like the Pat Robertson evangelical types very seriously, and I don’t think most of America does. But I could be wrong about that because I’ve never been familiar with any of these groups of religious zealots, not even as a child growing up. I guess I was lucky.

There were other people in the running. But Robertson beat them out this year. I often wonder how these people think their names will go down in history one day.

Robertson had some stiff competition for the title, managing to beat out notorious homophobe Niall Ferguson; Rev. George Gebauer, who came under fire for refusing to baptize a lesbian couple; Scott Lively, who has single-handily taken credit for inspiring Russia’s anti-gay laws, and outspoken anti-gay adoption politician Winston McKenzie.

You can read more here.