I mean, I was a kid in the 1990s, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say "AIDS. AIDS is what happened."

Going back a bit further, I think on the whole, historically, LGBTQ+ visibility and rights in Western culture has something to do with women's rights. Basically, I think misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are intimately linked. (Laverne Cox expressed a similar sentiment, how what transphobia boils down to is "there's nothing worse to be than a girl.") Transphobia is about keeping the genders separate and distinct, and definitions of things like "what a man is" and "what a woman is," homophobia is likewise largely about gender roles, "what men do," "what women do," how men and women define each other by contrast with each other, the division of labor, the idea that men and women are mutually codependent and can only be complete in combination. But these things are also mostly about keeping women in their place, and maintaining men's control over women. The 20th century has had a lot of women's suffrage and women's liberation, as well as a pretty profound redefining of gender roles, changes in how women relate to labor and capital, and changes in what marriage means and its expectations and limitations. This is a whole fascinating topic I could go on a lot about in itself. And it hasn't always been positive for women, e.g. gaining access to male labor roles, but still being expected to perform the female ones, and therefore getting twice the work. But you see LGBTQ+ presence surge whenever the rigidly defined and divided gender roles are weakened, whether this ultimately benefits women or not.

Likewise, changes in possibilities for women meant a lot more ability to be queer for specific populations, especially lesbians. While the financial pressures of having double the pay gap in a relationship are still very real, the idea that two women could even support themselves financially seems a lot more achievable today than it was at many points in the past. Which means less reliance on heterosexual marriage.

Changes in medical science also made a difference for trans people. While there's evidence of trans people or gender non-conforming people everywhere in human history (in different cultural contexts, people we might understand as trans may have had a different model for understanding their gender identity) I gotta say, hormones and surgery do make a difference in the extent to which trans people are fully accepted and able to mainstream. That only became medically possible relatively recently (aside from cruder surgeries like castration) and it has only slowly become more widely accessible to people who want it. I think we're seeing another sea change now, as it becomes more accessible to teens and preteens who want it (and social transition even younger) which tends to lead to more outcomes for binary trans people that are indistinguishable from cis people. So you have things that just weren't possible in the past becoming more and more possible, though doubtlessly there were always people who wished for it.

So you can definitely see ripples of these things starting to take hold in the early 20th century, but in the 1960s things really start to take off. You have a lot of social taking of stock going on at once: civil rights and racial justice movements, the anti-war movement, feminism, the reclaiming of sexuality for women (the miniskirt as a symbol of power, in defiance of the idea that women deserved to get raped if they showed too much skin, owning their sexuality--though this shifted into the 1970s with pants becoming the symbol of female power), the Pill and the idea of sex for pleasure, not being trapped in an unwanted marriage (or possibly worse, a secret and shameful birth of a child given up for adoption) by a premarital pregnancy, "free love," discovery of drugs, men growing their hair long, and so on. There was a lot of serious questioning of morality: they were raised to believe that it was good for men to be manly and women to be feminine, and that fighting in war was patriotic and noble, and premarital sex was a sin, that drugs were evil and would destroy you, yet people just coming of age were finding they didn't want to get drafted and die in war, they wanted to fool around and experiment with drugs and not be so rigid about gender roles, and maybe everything they were told about morality was completely mistaken. In this you see LGBTQ+ people also becoming more prominent, and cishet people no longer sure they had the right to judge them or if they really knew if it was right or wrong to be different in that way. So you get Stonewall (1969) and STAR (1970), and in general a lot more community growing.

And in the 70s this seems to basically be continuing. Women wear pants, increasingly join the workforce, and get divorces in record numbers. David Bowie is an out bisexual. (Something he later recanted--whether or not AIDS had anything to do with that, we'll never know.) We get Roe v. Wade. There's growing interest in alternate sexual practices: kink, orgies, swinging/partner-swapping, different and taboo positions (e.g. oral on a woman, men receiving anal pleasure, women dominating men) female orgasms, women finding their vulvas and clitorises, sexual fulfillment being more of a journey than five heterosexual minutes in the missionary position where only the man finishes. At this point there's still a blurry line between transgender and transvestite, but that becomes the subject of more public attention and curiosity too--drag queens, the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Not all of this curiosity is friendly, but there's definitely more curiosity, and while there's still stigma, there's also a general social mood of openness to formerly taboo sexual and romantic practices, including hetero ones. It's becoming less of a big deal to have a single mom, or be one. Ironically it was divorce, rather than abortion, that was the biggest gender culture war of the 70s. It's just that that battle was well and truly lost. No one really cares if someone gets divorced these days.

(tbc)