LGBT

The Bruce Jenner story is all over the news lately. Remarkable how far we’ve come in the last twenty or thirty years in our attitudes toward what was once thought of as deviant sexual behavior.

Bruce Jenner was the All-American boy back when he won the Olympic decathlon in the 1976 Games. He was handsome, he was built like the ideal Olympic athlete, he was adored by millions of young American women. And now he’s openly discussing his desire to become a woman. His openness is amazing and admirable, and his decision is amazingly accepted by most Americans. Not all, certainly, but by way more than would have accepted it thirty years ago. I heard one newscaster say that there are over 700,000 transgenders in the U. S. today. Wow! Thirty years ago few had ever even heard of trasngenders and transgendering. But it goes hand in hand with our modern views on sexuality. Very soon now, every state will recognize the legality of same-sex marriage. Most people now accept gay men and women and their right to live together, to marry, to adopt children, to even have their own children through surrogate mothers or sperm donors. In the not so distant past, homosexuals were reviled, ridiculed, despised, tormented, bullied, beaten, killed. Most, to avoid the harassment, hid their sexuality, married opposite gender spouses, had children, probably lived out unhappy lives. Some committed suicide. Then along came Will and Grace, Modern Family, and Glee—to show and discuss, laugh at, laugh about openly gay relationships. Many tv shows had minor plot lines relating to LGBT themes (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), but the three mentioned above made these themes their main plot line. Ellen DeGeneres came out both on her early sit-com Ellen and on her talk show that she was gay. On Glee, Kurt Hummel and Blaine Anderson not only withstood the bullying over their gay relationship, they got married and on the Glee finale were about to have a child thanks to Rachel’s surrogate pregnancy. The 1992 movie The Crying Game forced viewers to consider and then reconsider exactly what constitutes love between men and women, between man and what we thought was woman. And then Brokeback Mountain in 2005 forced viewers to consider and then reconsider the sexual relationship between two men, the love between these two men. And in 2010 movie viewers were asked, in The Kids Are All Right, to consider the complexities of a lesbian marriage and the effects that might have on the two children they had by way of unnamed sperm donors. Julianne Moore and Annette Benning are the lesbian couple, and Mark Ruffalo the sperm-donor father of Laser, their young son. And, yes, the kids were all right.

Now it seems that Bruce Jenner’s kids are all right with his transgendering from Bruce to Belinda.

I certainly hope so, and I hope that the next twenty or thirty years will completely erase any remnants of animosity toward the LGBT community in this country as well as in most of the other countries of the world.