The thought experiment isn’t about children and adolescents but about adults. If you were for LGBTQ rights in 1995 and over age 25, chances are you would have been for civil rights for African-Americans if you were an American of the same age in 1955. The latter issue was as “invisible” to most white adults in 1955 as the former was to most heterosexual adults in 1995. Furthermore, anti-LGBTQ sentiment was still a pervasive and societally “acceptable” form of bigotry in 1995 to the degree that anti-black sentiment was in 1955.
Were you over 25 in 1995 (when TV and radio were just losing their dominance)? Were you opposed to same-sex marriage or did you support it? [these are rhetorical questions – don’t answer] There’s your very concrete and not-impossible thought experiment that will give you an idea of where you might have been in roughly similar circumstances 40 years earlier.
