And that isn't really surprising. It takes a long time for a society to go through all the growth pains that Russia has gone through. Consider this, Russia was the Soviet Union less than 25 years ago. How strange is that?
I was thinking tonight after watching "The Daily Show" about how it was here in the U.S. between 1963 and 1966 when I was in high school. I remember a man trying to pick me up in his car when I was 15 with the line, "Hey. Let's go have some fun!" At first I didn't know what he meant and then I sort of wanted to throw up in my mouth when I realized what he meant because I had no experience with people talking to me like this ever before in my whole life. I suppose I could have gotten angry but it was just so out of the blue that I said, "No thank you". and kept walking down the street and he drove away.
When I had been 12 years old my father and I (I was an Electrician's helper for my father in his Electrical Contracting business during the summers.) And so one business project was to electrically remodel a recording studio in Hollywood owned by a Gay couple. At the time my father was a conservative Republican and he didn't like the idea of gay people and even told me a story of someone he had met at the YMCA in Los Angeles in 1934 when he was 18 that had taken him to his house and tried to make a pass at him and my Dad hit him because he was naive like I was at 15 even even when he was 18. People just didn't talk about things like this in the straight world at all. In fact most women didn't know what a Gay person was and that name wasn't used yet anyway yet.
When I was between 15 and 18 I heard about football players from my high school and others that went out with baseball bats to hit Gay men and Black men in the head with on Friday and Saturday nights (so this was between 1963 and 1965 when I was in High School).
I remember my father talking about a friend of mine in church with other men and saying that he was a little effeminate. However, I knew he had a girlfriend who had gotten pregnant so I thought they were wrong about him at the time. In fact he was married twice during his life. He finally came out to me and many of his friends (but not to his church) because it wouldn't have been accepted there in his 50s. I think in some ways coming out so late in life wasn't good for him because he was dead by about 60 or 61.
Another friend of my wife's got AIDS during the 1980s and died around 1990 from it. It was very hard on my wife and I because he was a very old friend even for me at that point of at least 10 years or more at that point.
My point of view growing up was that people shouldn't harm or kill gay people or black people with baseball bats on Friday and Saturday nights whether it was in Los Angeles or in any other state. I thought all people had the right to live and not be tortured or killed. So, as Gay people started to get more rights I was glad then that less of them would be killed (especially in the U.S. and Europe).
It's not that I wanted our world society to become completely transformed like it has now I just wanted people to stop killing them and putting them in jail for being gay around the world.
Lately I have been hearing about American Christian evangelists going to Africa who are now behind the Death penalty for being Gay in some African Countries now and this seems sort of crazy to me now.
I think maybe within another 50 years Russia likely will become a lot more like the U.S. and Europe already are. It all just takes time to think through and for societies to allow people to have more rights of any kind. It all takes time so I don't think people should be surprised if Russia still needs another 50 years to socially get to where Europe and the U.S. are now.
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