Last week we posted a fabulous supercut of news reports from the 1970s about gay people and the emergence of a fight for LGBT rights, which ranged from early Pride parades to the homophobia of Anita Bryant. Now SuchIsLife Videos has followed that up with another hour of fantastic vintage news footage, this time looking at at gay rights in the 1980s.
It was certainly a tumultuous decade of contradictions, as the footage shows. On the one side were ever larger and more celebratory Pride parades, as well as the first serious attempts to enact laws that protected gay couples in the same way as straight couples. However on the other side there was increasing violence against a more visible gay minority and of course the emergence of AIDS, a disease whose impact is almost impossible to underestimate.
If you haven’t watched the 70s footage, I would highly recommend it. Then come back here and watch this. One of the most interesting things is the change in how the news starts to view gay people. In the 70s it’s very much looking at LGBT as a weird ‘them’ who live parallel lives to the ‘normal’ people, but in the 80s you can see the first glimmers of gay people becoming part of ‘us’ to the mainstream media, even if that change engendered a backlash. Take a look below.
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