The 1990s was the Decade before 9/11 changed the sense of the world, before AIDS was a chronically manageable condition for parts of the world; and it changed the balance of the generational birth rate.

Generation X was the sandwich generation and the adult children of alcoholics, and we were a smaller at birth demographic and our numbers reduced further by AIDS.

For lesbians, it was the Post Butch Femme, we had worked with Heterosexual women from the 1960s and 1970s to achieve the legislated equal pay for equal work and with that, the ability to form our own credit rating not dependent on a father or husband to co-sign, and reproductive rights.

From the women’s movement, we shifted into AIDs support and caretaking as the gay men were the ones affording health care so the virus could be identified, being a slower killer than other viruses out of Africa in the era, with Ebola killing withing 24 hours usually and only in 2019 is there a vaccine for that.

We were no longer butch and femme mimicking heterosexuals, we were Dykes and we were getting things dyke done with respect to human rights across demographics.

In the 1990s, the Gay and Lesbian community presented to the mainstream a Just Like You, Just Happen to be Queer – we were Act Up, Queer Nation and Lesbian Avengers and fighting to serve in the Military and Marriage Equality at the same time.

In Canada, at the Supreme Court, it was Joshusa Birch who won the right for gays and lesbians to serve in the military, while Egan and Nesbitt won survivor benefits, Brian Mossop lead the way for Federal Government queer employees to have equal benefits and it was a group of couples who won marriage equality – not same sex marriage as the phrase in the media was to ensure the disgust reaction of the anal sex imagery or same gender marriage as the community tried to adjust for value judgement language, it was before the court and under the law – marriage equality in 2003.

From 1980 to 2004, Angles was the Vancouver queer paper – for most of it’s run “Gay and Lesbian” to a final era of “Lesbian Bisexual and Gay” to “LGBT” by 2004. with 2019, the Canadian term LGBTQ2 – adding Queer which is a comprehensive and inclusive word of all sexuality including asexual and Two Spirited, from the ingenious culture inclusive of transgender and nonbinary as genderfluidity to the spectrum of sexuality, what we are and what we are attracted to.

This blog and this presentation was prepared by Nina Tryggvason, former news editor, news and arts writer and photographer.

for a while the Toronto paper – Xtra, which began in the late 1970s and peaked in the early 1990s with Xtra in Toronto, Xtra West in Vancouver, Island Xtra on Vancovuer Island, Calgary Xtra in Albert and Capital Xtra in Ottawa is in this era. http://www.dailyxtra.com.

I left Angles and wrote for Xtra West for a short while.

and also, for an American Lesbian Magazine Girlfriends about the 1990s lesbian cancer scare that ended the Lesbian Chic of kd lang, Melissa Etheridge and Ellen coming out.

the 1990s was the era when the public found out about the Germany WW2 camps where the allies did not free everone, they left the queer prisoners in prison.

It was the decade of the end of the closet language, where it was the political that was personal. instead of in this era, when pronouns are personal; and talking points which had bullets are replaced with bullets and cars into crowds with protest signs are deemed speech issues rather than the crimes of the state or by the individual who confuses their religious viewpoint with the secualar law and fails to understand that rights are extended and not demanded, and are not to be denied when asserted, the right to exist trumps the right to complain that others do.

#Lest We Forget is an admonishment to not be a bystander.

Not inside the LGBTQ2 comunity or outside in the mainstream.

After all, we as a species continue to demonstrate, the minority needs protection because the majority cannot be trusted to be fair in the first place.

Nina Tryggvason

2019 – Naughty Ninties Queer Dyke Media Intro.