Important demographic distortions created conditions for a more open attitude toward both blacks and gays than had been possible before or would be p… - Christopher Caldwell

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Important demographic distortions created conditions for a more open attitude toward both blacks and gays than had been possible before or would be possible after. A program of mass incarceration, launched as part of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, had landed the great majority of young black criminals in jail. For the first time in a generation, black neighborhoods became safe for non-blacks to enter and spend money in, and the non-incarcerated remainder had more in common with their non-black contemporaries than had seemed to be the case in previous generations. What had most bothered people about gays, as late as the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, was the promiscuity of the anonymous “bathhouse” scene. Then the AIDS epidemic arose, and by the time effective therapies came on the market in 1994, hundreds of thousands of the men who had belonged to that world were dead. The survivors had been selected for fidelity and bourgeois prudence, and many had shown extraordinary courage and character in enduring the worst ordeal any group of American men had undergone since the Vietnam War. The movement for gay marriage won over Hawaii’s Supreme Court in 1996 and Vermont’s in 1999.