That book/movie was an Awakening for so many bb queers I knew, aww.
I think the acceptance is historically true in a sense -- it happened with someone I knew a while ago in a small town in Maine. Her father's cousin raised her and lived with another woman for about twenty years and they weren't really out but they weren't closeted, either, and people accepted it. It helped that her family was white, fairly well-off, and had lived in the town for about thirty thousand years. If you don't rock the boat and start demanding stuff like social equality (like, with the local Black population eating in your restaurant!) small towns like that can be very protective. People like to see that environment as either idyllic OR prejudiced and horrifying, and the truth is, like most things, it's an AND situation. People in small towns can be accepting of people they think are, well, acceptable, on their terms, AND they can be horrifying to outsiders. (Insert Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" HERE. It's amazing how rarely anti-Semitism gets brought up when people talk about that story, but anyway.)
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I think the acceptance is historically true in a sense -- it happened with someone I knew a while ago in a small town in Maine. Her father's cousin raised her and lived with another woman for about twenty years and they weren't really out but they weren't closeted, either, and people accepted it. It helped that her family was white, fairly well-off, and had lived in the town for about thirty thousand years. If you don't rock the boat and start demanding stuff like social equality (like, with the local Black population eating in your restaurant!) small towns like that can be very protective. People like to see that environment as either idyllic OR prejudiced and horrifying, and the truth is, like most things, it's an AND situation. People in small towns can be accepting of people they think are, well, acceptable, on their terms, AND they can be horrifying to outsiders. (Insert Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" HERE. It's amazing how rarely anti-Semitism gets brought up when people talk about that story, but anyway.)