A quick heads up before we start the show today, there are several pieces of archival audio in today's episode

that include people using homophobic slurs.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

For generations, gay people were the target of noxious stereotypes in the United States.

Players in the homosexuals. The second you see your son dropping the limperist, you rock over there and crack that wrist!

Halls of worship and airwaves were full of hateful propaganda.

AIDS is the judgment of God and that's the title of the sermon tonight. AIDS, the judgment of God.

Build a great big large fence, put all the lesbians in there.

Gay rights advocates are outraged over a ruling yesterday by a Virginia judge which denied a mother custody of her son because she's a lesbian.

The judge said the relationship is in his words illegal and immoral.

And have that fierce electrified that they can't get out, feed them and you know what, in a few years they'll die out.

In classrooms, workplaces and social settings, homophobes targeted gay people with violence.

And Matthew Shepherd was beaten last weekend tied to a wooden fence by two men who met Shepherd in a bar in Laramie, Wyoming.

18 hours later, a passing bicyclist summoned help after almost mistaking Shepherd's bloody body for a scarecrow.

There were few places to escape. Homophobia was widespread throughout the Western world.

Being accomplished or brilliant was no defense.

The pain of the past is not the focus of our episode today. It is only the backdrop.

But it is necessary to see this backdrop clearly to understand something very new and very surprising.

Things have changed dramatically in the United States when it comes to attitudes about gay people.

This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion in the United States.

This week on Hidden Brain, this is huge.

A favorite 2019 episode, exploring the psychology of one of the most dramatic transformations of public attitude, ever recorded.

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