Yeah, try being LGBTQ+ back then compared to now. Coming out (or being forced out) of the closet back then was a truly dangerous thing. Nobody in my high school was out (including myself) and we lived in constant fear. Not just of being beaten up or kicked out of our homes: Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of us died from AIDS, and the general population was utterly indifferent about it. Hell, the religious right capitalized on it, claiming God was punishing us.
And it's not just LGBTQ+ stuff. Autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety disorders, and many other conditions are well known now, but back then they just called the kids stupid and made life hell for them. It wasn't only other kids doing this - school teachers, principals, guidance counsellors, and even parents all played a big part of it. Kids killed themselves over these things (I personally lost several friends to suicide through the 80's and 90's - the youngest was fifteen years old).
What's that, you say? What about the Inflation? The High interest rates? Back in 1993 I bought my first house at 13.9% interest. We were in the midst of a deep recession. Unemployment was sky-high. Jobs were very difficult to come by, even in health care. Because it was an employer's market wages were kept low, because if you were lucky enough to have a job you didn't complain about wages. Remember, when you read the news and they say "Interest rates are the highest they've been in 30 years, inflation is the highest it's been in 30 years", they are talking about the 1990's.
I have many fond memories of the 80's and 90's (hell, my first book, published here, was written about those memories), but it was most certainly not the utopia that you think it was. Although the right wing nutters are trying their damnedest to take us back to the 1950's, even with their constant war on human rights we're still in a far better place than we were in the 1990's.
