NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ECMO3" data-source="post: 8499950" data-attributes="member: 7030563">I don't think you can really judge things in 80s by today's standards.  People in that era just did not care what other people thought about pretty much anything and bigotry was widespread.  I don't think it is accurate to say people did not know this was wrong, they just didn't care and for the most part no one else cared either.I can remember my uncle coming to my parents house over the holidays and talking about how he and some of his friends went "gay bashing" the night before.  They picked up a guy at a "gay bar" we all knew about and then rolled him and stole his money.  They talked about this over Turkey like it was normal and no one really cared, he even complained about how little the guy was carrying.  This same uncle was actually bisexual himself, although we called him "gay" at the time.   The term "bisexual" was not used, either you had sex with members of the same sex and you were "gay" (or other slurs used to describe that) or you didn't and then you were not "gay".  Whether you also had sex with members of the opposite sex was irrelevant to "being gay" or not.There was an African-American family that moved into the Italian section of Trenton where a some of my relatives lived and his house burned down.  I don't know for a fact it was Arson and it was never investigated by the police, but it was widely believed the residents did it because they did not want them there.We also had an African-American owned house burn down on my street.  My neighborhood was an integrated neighborhood, but a couple of the kids who lived in that house were caught breaking and entering and it was widely believed they were involved in a string of robberies that same summer, so they burned down their house and forced them to move.  Again, never investigated.This kind of stuff was as "normal" as smoking on an airplane or putting your kid in your lap for a long road trip.Sure, there were activists complaining about this at the time (as there were complaining about smoking and carseats) but they were considered a bunch of "whack jobs" and no one really took them seriously.In that context I don't find it surprising this was written and I doubt many at the time would have even noticed or cared, including those allegedly targeted.  That was life at the time.</blockquote>

Verification