GL Drama Lovers Club

 RealNevermore:

Great find. Really want to watch this documentary.

We are going through our pregnancy planning and it is really difficult to be same sex parents in a conservative society. In our country same sex family is legalized by law but not marriage, the apex court has given verdict that anyone can start a family with anyone but didn't allow same sex marriage. Surprisingly our families are very supportive in our decision of becoming parents, even more than they were initially in case of us becoming a couple.

That's amazing! Wishing you the best of luck with everything.

Yeah, over here nothing's in law yet. I don't know when Romanian politics will be at the quality necessary for same-sex marriage and adoptions/same sex family to be legalized. So far, you can adopt but only single person afaik, and they also thankfully passed that European Union law recently about marriages performed outside the country. Those are legal now, throughout the EU, regardless of specific country's laws.

Small steps. But I fear without external pressure, Romania will continue to be stupid when it comes to gay marriage. :(

 MarkWasHere:

Change is inevitable, although it is happening much slower than we'd like. Surveys consistently show that younger generations are more progressive and less religious (on average) than their parents' and grandparents' generations. Opposition to gay marriage is predominantly motivated by religious reasons, so that is why the decrease in religiosity among younger people is relevant. 

In Australia (where I live), we held a referendum in 2017 regarding the question of same-sex marriage. 61.6% of voters voted "yes" and 38.4% voted "no". The only areas that had a majority "no" vote were areas with a large immigrant population, many of whom immigrated from "Muslim" countries.

Sounds good for Australia!

Although what we had here was still a referendum but with the question of writing in the constitution that marriage is between a man and a woman. They wanted to modify the constitution. This was in 2018. We're backwards 😭 Thankfully this referendum didn't pass.

I do think society is less religious but not by much. Idk the statistics though. The country is not even Muslim. Most of it is Christian Orthodox. But we're also an ex-communist country that got out of it in '89. Not a lot of time has passed since then. Too religious, too conservative still. :(

 MarkWasHere:

Change is inevitable, although it is happening much slower than we'd like. Surveys consistently show that younger generations are more progressive and less religious (on average) than their parents' and grandparents' generations.

A couple of years ago I still believed this, but too many times in history progress/tolerance has gone backwards, and it appears to be happening again, at least in Europe and the US. Being gay was completely normal in ancient Greece. A surprising number of China's emperors had male concubines. Colonialism and the Jesuits killed indigenous queer acceptance around the globe. 1920's Berlin was the surprisingly progressive European queer hotspot for gay and trans people alike, but just a bit over a decade later, queer people were in concentration camps and the avant-garde queer studies from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft were among the first books to be burned. I no longer believe there's a continuous inevitable upwards trend. The line just sometimes goes up, and sometimes down.

Back in 2017 we were still making progress, for sure. But I don't think we are anymore. At this point I don't think I have to point at the tsunami of anti-queer legislation being proposed and passed anymore? It's clear how bad it is right? It starts with trans people as a gateway, an easy target, a canary in the coalmine, and then gradually whatever arguments/sentiments worked against trans people get extended to the rest of the queer letters.

As to why sometimes the line goes up and sometimes down, it appears that people are on average more tolerant when they are (economically) feeling secure themselves. When they feel uncertain about their own futures, especially when their standard of living is decreasing, they get scared of added uncertainty, because they can't afford to lose anything else anymore. And then they're more easily taken in by narratives that portray queerness as a threat that could negatively affect them. And that's why it statistically tends to be the middle classes who are more open-minded about this, and lower classes who aren't (and which class do immigrants tend to be?). It's about whether they themselves feel safe enough to give a little bit of leeway to others. Can they afford to let go of a little bit of social control, without fear?

Given that global economic and political power is now in the process of shifting away from Europe and the US towards Asia, I expect to see Asia continue to slowly progress, and Europe and the US increasingly regress. Fascist parties with explicitly anti-queer agendas keep getting large shares of the vote, and I wish I was still optimistic about that changing anytime soon, but I'm really not.

Organized religion certainly doesn't help, but queerphobia can absolutely persist without. My conversion therapists were secular, for example.

I think organized religion is something people gravitate towards most strongly when they're not doing well themselves, to find answers, guidelines for life, community or solace or whatever. So if personally not doing well is both correlated with increased religiosity ánd with decreased tolerance of difference, then maybe it's more of a correlation-situation than a causation-situation. But partially, yeah, I do think religious doctrines are partially inherently the cause of queerphobia. Just not entirely. 

We have to be careful of political 'pinkwashing', aka using the 'well here in the west we're more enlightened when it comes to queer and women's rights, while people from other countries are backwards, so we can't let too them close because they're a threat to our culture' -argument, which tends to be used by western conservatives who themselves would actually like to do away with those queer and women's rights but who'll gladly strategically use them against immigrants, especially muslims.

 Tina:

That's amazing! Wishing you the best of luck with everything.

Thank you for your kind wishes. We are currently going through the legal procedures because we want to do a reciprocal IVF which falls under grey area of the law in our country, surrogacy is prohibited for same sex couple so couples have to approach as a single mother. Here lesbian couples has done it before and the mother giving birth will become the legal parent (though not biological mother) but there are workaround which couples used like deed of familial association and guardianship for legal protection of non legal parent. So, we are making ourselves familiar with every possibilities, the fertility clinic we approached is helping greatly in this regard, they are very LGBTQ friendly and will provide legal assistance too.

 Tina:

I don't know why they think China is best country, considering everything the CCP does. :( At this point, their thread is more like propaganda for the CCP rather than anything.

Thank you again for your sweet words :)

If you ask me, I will say to stay away from those online forums where CCP shills are flocking, there is no point to argue with them. Most of the times, multiple account commenting there will be one single CCP shill or the so called Little Pink. There is no need to ruin your peace of mind for them to accept something which they are indoctrinated from birth to hate.

P.S -  Btw I found this while digging on the Two Moms docu you found out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUNoz6QqrIA

hi im new gl and this chat so if theres any good starter gls anyone would recommend me then i would be delighted :) im open to anything and would also love to see what everyones favs series are!!

 emzers:

hi im new gl and this chat so if theres any good starter gls anyone would recommend me then i would be delighted :) im open to anything and would also love to see what everyones favs series are!!

Welcome 🙂 Could you tell what have you seen so far?

 RealNevermore:

Welcome 🙂 Could you tell what have you seen so far?

I havent seen any proper series but ive watched a couple youtube ones such as "INTP flirting" and "afraid of" which i enjoyed but i know there a better series out there but im just unaware of them.