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I am not OP.
That said, I looked at the two of your links that described clear incidents that are well known, and as I say they were from a time before my parents were born. The Wikipedia page I take seriously but it's a list of literally every violent incident or attempted violent incident that happened to a person who might have been LGBTQ, some incidents obviously anti-gay some incidents almost certainly not; I accept that there is significant anti-gay sentiment in some parts of the rural backwoods but you could compile a list of violent incidents affecting Jews, Christians, or indeed pretty much any identity group in a country of 300 million people and have it look pretty bad.
Ultimately I'm almost sure nobody here was alive in the 50s and I doubt most of us were alive in the 70s. OP seems to me broadly correct that the period of greatest gay-activist belligerence coincided with the period of greatest gay tolerance everywhere except the most rural of Red America.
Not aiming this at you but stating generally: I have a broad distaste for guilt-trip based activism based on events that happened far away and outside my living memory, and I think we have too much of it from a lot of groups. I also think that the campaigning around gay marriage served as the prototype for a lot of cancel culture, and vastly increased the harm done by transgender campaigners because everyone remembered what had happened to the people who expressed doubts about gay marriage.
Historically from the timing I think it's pretty clear that gay marriage had nothing to do with not wanting to get beaten up and very little to do with wanting hospital visitation rights - we had Civil Partnerships in the UK before we had gay marriage. Brendan Eich wasn't fired in 2014 to prevent academics getting chemically castrated and Tim Farron (head of the UK lib dems) wasn't defenestrated in 2017 to stop them getting stabbed. Broadly, as a pro-gay-marriage activist at the time I would say gay marriage was powered by It's About Time progressivism and a deep optimism about the flexibility and direction of society that was not borne out by events.
I was.
Oh, cool! Happy to be wrong.
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Hey gramps, do you remember anything about this episode in history (the psychosurgery bit, not the trans bit)?
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