It sounds like your life is certainly not boring at the moment,
@Pengu.
@NyghtOwl, hey, at least you've had relations and you have a boyfriend! So people find you attractive...I'm the one that nobody checks out or has ever found attractive.
In any case, the new book I'm reading is
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, which is about the struggle for gay rights from the 50s to today. Even though there are still issues to overcome, when you think about it it's amazing how quickly gay rights have been accepted by society at large.
Not even a lifetime ago, just being reported to the authorities for homosexual behaviour (which was a crime) probably meant the end of your life as you knew it. You were almost certainly rounded up, interrogated to get the names of anyone you'd fooled around with (who were likewise rounded up), and thrown in jail if you were lucky...if you weren't, you were sent to a psychiatric hospital to be 'cured', which often meant electroshock therapy and forced hormone treatments, and occasionally also included lobotomies. In any case, if you were anybody professionally, you also probably lost your job, and good luck finding another decent job, since any background check would show you were convicted of homosexuality (and at this time services popped up specifically to investigate whether a potential hire might be a homosexual).
In short, your life was ruined, and it didn't matter what other merits you had as a person or what good you'd done in your role...at that point you were just a "homosexual", and depending on the person that meant you were a criminal, mentally ill, and/or a sinful pervert.
I presume the later chapters will be more positive.
I'd never considered it before starting the book out of curiosity, but it's a shame that this isn't taught more prominently...in school you're taught world history and the history of your country, and at least in America there's a black history month and a women's history month, but I don't think I've ever heard a mention of LGBTQ history. And this stuff is important...if you're part of the LGBTQ community, this is
our history, and it's especially worthy of study to know the struggles of the people that came before us. After all, it's because of their struggles and their suffering that we have the rights and the status that we can take for granted today.