How is the Western world so much worse than us Serbs on this until like the late 2000s/early 2010s? And to be clear we have never been good to our non-Straight/non-Cis people.
Welcome to the scars of the Cold War, they run deep in the American psyche. Well, that, and the AIDS epidemic at this specific point. And actually the Civil War too. Let's break it down.
Let's start with the US Civil War and the culture thereof. While the South lost the war, the failure of Reconstruction would allow them to go on to define society in a lot of ways, and when you let a bunch of racist theocratic military aristocrats from a neo-feudal society define your culture, you get internalized bigotry.
This set the stage for the early 1900s. We don't like to talk about it, but a lot of the same forces that brought the Nazis to power in Germany were also present and active in the US. But it actually wasn't as bad as it would be later. The general behavior at the time towards LGBTQ+ stuff was firmly in the Things We Do Not Talk About category. It could and did happen openly, but no one
talked about it. Not ideal, but better than what would come next.
Enter the Cold War and the absolute
deluge of propaganda. The nuclear family and the stay at home mother were now symbols of American pride. Complicating things further, the LGBTQ+ groups of the era were, well, pretty unabashedly associated with Communism, and therefore targets for the FBI and other such groups, as well as public scorn and hate. This was not a good time to be gay, the 1960s and 1970s, but worse was still to come.
June. 1981. The first case of AIDS is reported in America. And all hell breaks loose. It hits the gay community (and specifically the gays, not the lesbians) hard and fast. Ronald Reagan, damned be his name, saw a chance to knock out a voting block that historically opposed his party, and had the US government do
nothing. (Okay, that's not entirely fair, the CDC started work pretty much instantly, but there was no big official response until 1986. If you're seeing parallels to more recent events, congratulations, you have pattern recognition.) The disease spread through the gay community like fire, killing thousands. If you've ever wondered why the lesbians get top billing in the acronym, it's because of the heroic efforts they made to save the gay community when no one else would. In the space of a decade, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus suffered over 100% casualties. It was brutal. And a lot of the US started to associate the disease with immorality, a punishment from god. We
deserved what happened to us for engaging in our sinful lifestyle. And of course, because it was a punishment for sin, that meant that they, the good, god fearing, cis-het straights, had nothing to fear from the disease! (Yeah, that didn't exactly work out.) Welcome to the 1980s.
This was the height of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in the US. But, at the same time, it probably did have positive long term effects. It took the LGBTQ+ community and moved it from Things We Do Not Talk About to something everyone talked about, and in time that led to the gay rights movements of the 1990s and 2000s, which ultimately brought about some measure of equality.
This story is currently in early 1991. AIDS is still going strong, and will be for another five years, as the first truly effective treatment for the disease wouldn't occur until 1995. The Berlin Wall only fell a year and a half ago. The collapse of the Soviet Union won't happen until the end of the year. And even today we STILL haven't dealt with the mess left over from the Civil War.
Noa is part of a quite literally criminalized minority (two, actually, but let's just focus on the lesbian bit), and that's not even going to start to change until the back half of the decade. Fortunately for her the stigma against lesbians was always weaker than the stigma against gays, but it still wasn't a good time.
With all of that in mind, Lorna's reaction is honestly pretty mild. Popular culture would have her believe that Noa is a plaguebearer, a purveyor of sin, a servant of the communists, and a Threat To America. Hiding in her room and just Not Dealing With It is honestly about the best Noa could have hoped for.
