Thursday evenings, the dear old CBC has an excellent show called Doc Zone. A few months back, host Anne Marie MacDonald began the show with the provocative question “How did we get so gay?”
I should mention that Anne Marie herself is a multi-talented person, who also happens to be openly gay.
I thought about this as I watched the Oscars, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris who is openly gay, or metro-sexual if you prefer. The viewing audience for his lame jokes was down from last year, so in 2016 they might just go back to Ellen Degeneres, who is also openly gay.
The fact that it used to be very very different is demonstrated in one of this year’s Oscar-winning movies, The Imitation Game. It tells the story of Alan Turing. He was part of the team that broke the German Enigma code and most likely saved millions of lives during World War Two.
Turing was a homosexual at a time when you could not be the least bit open about it. They could put you behind bars for many years, or you could opt for chemical castration. Turing tried the latter, then committed suicide in 1954. It took almost 60 years for his country to give him a posthumous pardon, and recognize his achievements at Bletchley Park during the war.
33 year old American Graham Moore wrote the screenplay, and picked up the Oscar. His acceptance speech said it all about how things have changed.
Kathleen Wynne, the openly gay Premier of Ontario, had a mildly bumpy ride this past week when her government introduced a new sex education curriculum. Some folks were upset that the idea of same sex couples will now be taught as early as kindergarten. The Premier says the negative reaction is partly homophobic.
Can you possibly imagine the reaction if she had tried to do any of it even a decade ago ?
I’m Roger Currie
