Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
One other thought I have for today. Back in January (when the law got its first reading in the Duma), I mentioned the recent death of an American woman named Jeanne Manford, the founder of America's first-ever group for heterosexuals who support gay rights, now known as PFLAG. Mrs. Manford began her efforts in 1972, three years after New York's "Stonewall Riots" in June 1969. Around 1973, the word "gay" in the sense of "homosexual" was used for the first time ever on a U.S. television network (the word had been "underground slang" since approximately the WW2 era). In 1977, on the sitcom All in the Family, Edith Bunker attends a cousin's funeral and learns that "Cousin Liz" had been in a relationship with another woman for 20 years or so. In 1980, an 18-year-old public high school boy made national newspaper headlines by suing (and winning) over the right to bring his boyfriend to the school prom. Throughout the 1980s, the phenomenon of AIDS and the need to combat its spread made it increasingly impossible to not discuss homosexuality in mainstream media. By the 1990s, the topic of gay teenagers "coming out" in high school was rather old news -- rarely worth a headline anymore -- having been discussed a million times on talk shows like Donahue and Oprah.

I might add that in the UK, they struck down anti-sodomy laws in 1967 -- 6 years after the banned-in-America film Victim, whose protagonist was a British gay man targeted by a blackmailer. And in the late 1960s, the "flamingly queer" characters of Julian and Sandy attained massive cult popularity on UK radio (ten years before "Mr. Humphries" on BBC TV).

In short, if very few Russians in Russia have objected to the law -- not counting Russians like Nikolai Alekseev, who naturally shouldn't be counted, since his gay opinions are now punishable by fines -- part of the reason is, perhaps, that they're coming to this topic several decades later than in the West.
Part of the reason gays seem like they are so prominent in media right now is because they are still in the process of gaining equality, even in western societies. the United States has yet to make same-sex marriage legal at the federal level, although it is now legal in a few states (including my own) and several other western countries have legalized it, in Europe as well as South America. But gays were also silenced for decades, and so openly gay people on TV is still a relatively new phenomenon in the west. Once true equality is achieved, there will be less need for all the protests and hoopla. In fact, I am already hearing annoyance expressed by a growing number of people in the gay community itself, that gay people on TV are too flamboyant and over-the-top, and do not properly represent the LGTB community.