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What are some things about the past people get wrong today? (piefed.social)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] 33 points 8 months ago (8 children)

"There didn't used to be so many LGBTQ+ people back in the day"

It's because folks were forced into the closet with threats of institutionalization, prison, physical harm, marginalization, and even death. And then there probably was a time when there were fewer gay people, because HIV ravaged the gay male population in many parts of the world while our leaders turned a blind eye because it was killing "the right" people for a time.

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  • [–] 21 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Go even further back, and nobody gave a shit if you were gay. Or were even considered weird for not doing gay stuff.

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  • [–] -4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    There's no way to know this for sure. Though we have examples throughout history of some cultures being accepting of homosexual or transgender identities, it's entirely possible that most prehistorical cultures were strictly heteronormative just as they were once we started recording history.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Started recording history? Like in ancient Greece, one of the gayest cultures in all of time? Like ancient Egypt with its myths about jizz in lettuce? Ancient china with its noted love of femboys and general belief that being gay was just "a thing young men do, that is fine for them to do so long as they do their social duty of marrying and having babies"?

    Maybe prehistoric society was violently heteronormative and it's true we can't know... But saying "cultures were strictly heteronormative when we started recording history" is fucking hilarious. Heteronormativity is if anything a modern disease caught from abarhamic religion.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago

    I said most cultures in recorded history have been heteronormative. In Ancient Greece, the most commonly cited example, it was a mixed bag and was more often about pederasty and power dynamics than it was about equal homosexual relationships. It wasn't a one-to-one equivalence of the way we view sexuality today.

    As I said, there were times and places where it happened, but you'll struggle to find more than a handful of examples of accepted homosexuality throughout recorded history.

    Do you disagree that homosexuality has been overwhelmingly a taboo in pre-modern times? Or that it was ever accepted in a way that it is in developed societies today?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    [Laughs in Greco-Roman]

    Funny enough, back in the days before the queer rights movements, an education in the classics was important. Lots of people would have known about Sappho, and the one emperor that got made fun of for being straight, even if they didn't approve. It's a very recent myth.

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