(note: I realize the 20 year rule means this conversation can't extend to a time period more recent than 1996)

I know a few bits and pieces of things that affected the lives of gay people, but wondering if you can help fill me in on more. I admit I'm not old enough to have lived through this time, so can you help give some insight into what it would have been like to be gay then? Was "civil unions" or "gay marriage" a thing people even thought about?

• in the 1950s in England, Alan Turing was convicted of "indecency" from a 1885 law regarding relations between two men.

• DOMA defined marriage in 1996 - 2013 as man-woman

• In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as a mental disorder. A large-scale study of homosexuality in 1962 was used to justify inclusion of the disorder as a supposed pathological hidden fear of the opposite sex caused by traumatic parent–child relationships. This view was widely influential in the medical profession.[15] In 1956, however, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker performed a study that compared the happiness and well-adjusted nature of self-identified homosexual men with heterosexual men and found no difference.[16] Her study stunned the medical community and made her a hero to many gay men and lesbians,[17] but homosexuality remained in the DSM until 1973. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots#Homosexuality_in_20th-century_United_States