A lot of the details of my high school days are just a hazy blur, but one thing I can say with absolute certainty: when I graduated in 1967 the very concept of same sex marriage would have been met with total derision by virtually everyone in the country.
How the world can change in forty short years.
Back then, the word "homosexual" was never uttered on television, "gay" was still a synonym for "happy", and a guy could enjoy show tunes without having his guy-ness called into question.
Heck, back then most people could truthfully (if not strictly accurately) say that they didn't even know anyone who was gay.
(Just for some additional context, recall that Loving v. Virginia, which finally declared race-based restrictions on marriage were unconstitutional, was decided on June 12, 1967.)
I think the first time I encountered the word "gay" applied to homosexuals was in a controversial article in Life magazine from sometime in the mid-60's. The only thing I remember now from that article is its claim that gays liked to wear sneakers and sweaters, and the only reason I remember that is because it became a running gag among some of my crowd. Whenever we saw someone in sneakers we'd make a comment.
But then in the late 60's and early 70's a gay activist movement began to gain some traction. Before long, gay characters began appearing occasionally in television shows, most notably on a famous episode of "All in the Family", where Archie Bunker learned that one of his drinking buddies was gay.
Somewhere around then, psychiatrists decided that homosexuality was not a disease after all, but a normal aspect of humanity's sexual behavior.
Oh, there were some kinks in the road as gays became more visible in society, such as when a third rate singer tried to revive her career by starting a campaign to "Save the Children" from the gay down in Florida.
But by the very early 80's it seemed that gay people were well on their way to achieving great gains in civil rights.
That's when AIDS entered our national consciousness. Since it was initially considered a gay disease ("gay plague" was one of its earliest nicknames), AIDS probably set back the gay rights movement by at least ten years.
But a funny thing happened. As more and more gay people "came out", many folks discovered that not only did they in fact know someone who was gay, but gays weren't as threatening as they had once thought.
Probably the single largest factor determining whether someone is for or against gay rights is whether they know someone who is gay or if there is a gay person in their family. (For example, take the Cheney family. Please.)
The second largest factor is age; the younger one is, the more likely one is to support gay rights.
Anyway, some time in the mid-90's the idea of same sex marriage began to make its way slowly into the public discourse.
And now the idea doesn't seem very strange to large segments of the population. Overall, the country seems to be about equally divided on the issue, and there are even a handful of states where it has a slim majority in favor of it.
In 1966 Kander and Ebb's musical "Cabaret" opened on Broadway. Set in Germany during the period that the Nazis were coming into power, one of its songs was performed by a German woman and her Jewish fiancé:
How the world can change
It can change like that
Due to one little word
"Married".
How the world can change. Indeed.
