What are your watershed years for major societal shifts you address in your writing?

[Euphony]

Oh that's interesting because sex ed stopped being gender segregated by freshman year of highschool. The puberty talks of sex ed were segregated but everything else was mixed.

I remember being utterly confused the partners we would likely have were also kept from us. The curriculum seemed night and day, the girls being a Q&A, boys being slides and a gay panic fire island hit piece "documentary.

 

[TadOverdon]

I was reminded that I fussed with my collaborator over a "Doonesbury" reference in a scene. How familiar would a character in her mid-forties have been with that strip when she was young? I sure wasn't, and had to have it explained to me.

Eventually I decided that the character would have it explained to her by her mother. Awkward, but the nature of collaborating, sometimes, is that the reference wasn't going to be deleted.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Researching sexual mores of a particular time has been more problematic. As people tend towards a wider spectrum w/intimacy subjects, I can stretch a little but I still wish I had more solid sources so I have a real sense of how transgressive I'm being in having sheltered character engage in a sex act.

This is where fellow authors from different generations should be able to provide assistance.

Taking nothing away from later generations, there is a finite point in time where their experiences would have begun. Baby boomers and older generations lived through the same time periods, and shared the same cultural and technological experiences as later generations, but benefit from their knowledge of earlier times as well.

Here's just one example:

In the late fifties and into the sixties, military surplus stores were common. They sold everything from the heavy duty steel utensils used in the Army mess halls to more obscure things such as parachutes. I mention parachutes because I lost my virginity on June 6, 1968 in my backyard under a surplus parachute with the girl next door while our parents were glued to the television watching the news about the Robert Kennedy assassination. You won't find details of an event such as that by researching the internet.

If you want to know what the life and times were like for periods before you were born, consider asking your fellow writers.

 

[oggbashan]

Some of you can even provide authentic details about what happened on Ides of March, 44 B.C.

But don't take Shakespeare's word for it. He had a chiming clock in his play Julius Caesar.

Some of us were around long before 44 BC.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Oh that's interesting because sex ed stopped being gender segregated by freshman year of highschool. The puberty talks of sex ed were segregated but everything else was mixed.

If I may randomly answer on of these posts: what year was that for your school? My high school had mixed gender "health ed" classes in 1970 or 1971. Although, that was in New York City which has always done things differently.

Our teacher was a guy in his twenties who was fairly low-key about sensitive topics but the whole thing wasn't particularly informative. I can't remember gay sex ever being mentioned. That was near the end of the "closet," and I had no idea of what the orientation was (with maybe one exception) of the 800 some-odd other students in my class.

 

[KeithD]

I graduated from high school in 1964. There was zero sex education in that school, at least. There was, of course, sex. But it was another twelve years before I got an in-depth education in sex and it wasn't in school.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

If I may randomly answer on of these posts: what year was that for your school? My high school had mixed gender "health ed" classes in 1970 or 1971. Although, that was in New York City which has always done things differently.

Our teacher was a guy in his twenties who was fairly low-key about sensitive topics but the whole thing wasn't particularly informative. I can't remember gay sex ever being mentioned. That was near the end of the "closet," and I had no idea of what the orientation was (with maybe one exception) of the 800 some-odd other students in my class.

My highschool graduating class is 2021

 

[lovecraft68]

My highschool graduating class is 2021

You didn't have to tell us that, it shows.

 

[intim8]

I tend to write in a sort of amorphous "now" unless it really matters. Sometimes it does, and sometimes I just like to recall what it was like before home computers (not just the internet, computers), cell phones, fake tits and ubiquitous shaving.

 

[oggbashan]

My High School graduation date?

In Australia long before most of you were born.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Partly because of the AIDS crisis but also anxiety over the school's reputation, we got Human Reproduction every year in secondary school science or biology, as well as an entire year of lessons on contraception in the inaccurately-named RE (Religious Education, until the National Curriculum, the only legally required subject). More like what schools now call PSHE or PSME - personal, social and health/moral education.

We got a lot of foreign students in sixth form (for the last two years of school, A-levels, required to get into university). Many of them had had no education about their own bodies at all. When my roommate shyly asked how you could pee with a tampon in and a friend said she'd also always wondered that, I got them to round up various friends, pulled out my A-level textbook and gave them lessons! One went on to become a doctor.

It was illegal at the time for state schools to mention homosexuality. Technically, mentioning it "as part of a pretended family relationship", but basically teachers didn't want to be accused of breaking the law. One of our teachers daringly told us that all we needed to know about being gay was that there was nothing wrong with it (girls' school so less worry about safer sex) but if anyone asked they'd never said that.

 

[gunhilltrain]

My highschool graduating class is 2021

You obviously were in a very different location/town than I was. But you might expect the hometown of Anne Bancroft (Anna Italiano) and Stanley Kubrick to be a bit ahead of other places.

 

[jaykaythree]

I don't know if it qualifies as a watershed as such, but 1968 and 69 feature in my "Naples, Missouri" stories, particularly in the lives of the respective fathers of my male and female leads.

Both those fathers were born in 1950. Female lead's father enlisted in the Marine Corps right out of high school, what with Vietnam going full tilt, while male lead''s father chose to go to university.

Keep in mind that Joe College wasn't the running-to-Canada type. He would have gone if called, but never was, although he came mighty close. In the draft lottery pertaining to Young men born the year he was, his birthday had a draft number in the 300s. One day earlier, and it would have been in the 20s.