Via The Advocate:
Take about 45 minutes out of your day (or night) and watch this 1967 documentary by CBS entitled CBS Reports: The Homosexuals. The news report(if you want to call it that) trots out every horrible stereotype about gays, or gay men in particular: we have domineering mothers and distant fathers, we're out to recruit the young, destroy society, are incapable of monogamy....you get the picture.
However, what was so scary in watching it was that many of those same stereotypes still exist in 2010. It's even scarier to think that an entire generation of kids (that most likely grew up to be my parents and yours) took the things shown this report as facts. People still believe you can "pray away the gay"be "turned out" or any other number of ridiculous ideas. Even though so much progress has been made--it's not illegal to have gay sex, we have much more visibility in society, homosexuality's no longer seen as a mental illness--there is still a ways to go in changing societal attitudes. However, there all few sane individuals in the report, such as an openly gay man shown at the beginning, and writer/artist Gore Vidal towards the end. Watch the report below:
Take about 45 minutes out of your day (or night) and watch this 1967 documentary by CBS entitled CBS Reports: The Homosexuals. The news report(if you want to call it that) trots out every horrible stereotype about gays, or gay men in particular: we have domineering mothers and distant fathers, we're out to recruit the young, destroy society, are incapable of monogamy....you get the picture.
However, what was so scary in watching it was that many of those same stereotypes still exist in 2010. It's even scarier to think that an entire generation of kids (that most likely grew up to be my parents and yours) took the things shown this report as facts. People still believe you can "pray away the gay"be "turned out" or any other number of ridiculous ideas. Even though so much progress has been made--it's not illegal to have gay sex, we have much more visibility in society, homosexuality's no longer seen as a mental illness--there is still a ways to go in changing societal attitudes. However, there all few sane individuals in the report, such as an openly gay man shown at the beginning, and writer/artist Gore Vidal towards the end. Watch the report below:
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