10 Things Gay Gen X Did in The 80s That Would Be Illegal Today

10 Things Gay Gen X Did in The 80s That Would Be Illegal Today Gay Gen X built an entire underground system just to have a social life in the 1980s. Fake names. Mob-run bars. Color-coded bandanas. Escape tunnels. Every single one of those survival tactics would violate somebody's law today. This is what that looked like. SOURCES: The Damron Address Book and how gay travelers navigated the country using coded abbreviations from 1964 to 2019 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor... How the Mafia ran gay bars in New York because the State Liquor Authority wouldn't license them https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe... The three-article rule and cross-dressing ordinances enforced in over 40 U.S. cities https://www.history.com/articles/ston... Police entrapment operations targeting gay men — over 50,000 arrests in New York alone across multiple decades https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources... Bowers v. Hardwick — the 1986 Supreme Court decision that upheld sodomy laws and said the Constitution did not apply to private consensual sex between same-sex adults https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_... The gay panic defense and how it reduced murder charges in roughly a third of documented cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_pan... No federal employment protection for gay workers until Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020 — and Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450 that banned gay employees from federal jobs in 1953 https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blo... The history of conversion therapy — electroshock, aversion conditioning, and institutionalization used on gay teenagers through the 1980s and beyond https://www.justia.com/lgbtq/youth/co...