I love The Golden Girls.
Ya’ll don’t have any idea how fucking brave and needed these plot lines were.
This was before Ellen came out.
This was before civil unions.
This was before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
This was when your ass could be fired, blacklisted, and shunned with no legal protections for even being hinted at being gay.
And the Golden Girls said “Fuck you, Fuck this, we’re doing it anyway.”
I think it should be noted that Blanche’s quote about AIDS is also “It is not god punishing people for their sins” and that the episode also deals with slutshaming.
I don’t know if people realize how much activism these women did for gay right and during the aids crisis. If you think about it they were all long established in Hollywood and Broadway. They had tons of friends personally affected and dealing with the aids crisis. Estelle Getty lost a nephew. I think they helped plant seeds in people who watched Golden Girls that helped make things a little more normalized and mainstream.
Also the reason the GRID/AIDS crisis got so bad was because the US government tried writing it off as divine punishment on the Gay Community. That’s literally what the homophobia of the early 2000s is rooted in and the Golden Girls basically said fuck you to anyone with a homophobic word in their mouth.
The GRID/AIDS crisis is terribly under emphasized in history and needs to be brought to light a lot more. The ramifications were enormous and can absolutely be felt today. It wasn’t just a moment in history. It was practically a genocide via apathy. Every single time the Golden Girls said “Gay Rights” was effectively a protest to the status quo of that era
