Hey, your Regency!Price…I hope we get more of him but you inspired me to mess about with some pics. I couldn’t resist!
Foaming at the mouth for this man and his stupid ass shoes.
You like him in his uniform. A man of Price's station hardly needs the backing of a military uniform to hold importance, no he carries that in the proud set of his shoulders, but you like him with all the bells and whistles. You like the way the dark coat looks against his skin, the way the high collar seems to strengthen his jaw, and all the golden accents that make his eyes sparkle. The only thing you can find to dislike about it is the way it draws other women's attention.
Price holds your fan, waving it in brisk motions to keep the both of you cool as you snag two glasses off a passing tray. You offer him one and he takes it graciously. It's funny how easily you fall in with his motions, how easily he falls into yours. You reach for your fan and he snaps it shut, your own bad habit mirrored back to you. You bite down your smile and try to be more dainty when you open it again.
"You're rather popular," You note, your eyes drifting to the crowd of women glaring at you. They exchange quiet but pointed words behind fans, you're sure if you were closer they'd raise their voices so you could hear what they called you. Nothing creative you're sure. Peacocks, the lot of them.
"The uniform is popular," Price responds.
"Not the man?" You raise a brow, catching the twitch of his smile, "Pity, I rather like the man."
"He likes you."
You hum, smile over the rim of your wine glass. You enjoy flirting more than you'd thought you would. Enjoy the way Price makes your stomach flip and your skin heat with only three words. You like the way his voice rumbles low in his chest when he says them. 'He likes you.' You smile a little more despite yourself, your teeth edging against the rim of the glass.
"You like when I say that?" You can hear the smile in his voice, feel the gentle pressure of his hand low against your back. It's a fleeting touch but it leaves you burning for more, improper in the best of ways.
"It's nice to hear," You tell him, flashing the warmth of your smile his way. There's no sense in hiding it when he already knows. Here's another thing you like, the way Price's eyes wrinkle at the corners when he smiles at you.
"It's the truth," The sincerity of his tone makes your heart ache. Nothing could have prepared you for this man, for the desire he churns in you. Longing for things you never let yourself dream of: love, marriage, children. Propriety says you're never supposed to seem too interested lest gossip spread about your virtue, but-
"A mutual one," You tell him, assure him with affection on your lips. You're sure after your first meeting with him your reputation is tarnished enough, you may as well be honest with the man that ruined it.
"Be still my heart," He rumbles, his smile as wide as you've ever seen it, "you'll kill me before we ever reach the alter tellin' me that sweetheart."
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The Social Climate of the 80s: Gay Edition
(An excuse to infodump A beginning guide to what life was like in 1980s USA for an average gay person, constructed for Stranger Things fans)
Disclaimer: I was born in 2004. I have sprinkled links throughout this small essay for further reading.
Content Warning: Uncensored slurs, violence toward LGBTQ people, extreme homophobia.
A topic of discussion in the Stranger Things fandom, specifically the Byler fandom, has been the apparent lack of understanding some fans have for what life was like for gay people in the time period of the show.
In order to understand canonically gay characters like Will and Mike Robin, it's important to understand the fear and hatred they faced on the daily (outside of the alternate-dimension monstrosities). Let's get into it.
"As a questioning teen in the 80’s, coming out seemed like an impossible mountain to climb. The Mount Everest of my life...I didn’t even have even a clue as how to get there...I didn’t even know what was on the other side. For all I knew, it was a dark abyss of sadness and hate. All I knew was that [it] was going to be a very unpleasant experience because that’s what I was told." -Eric Jimenez Lindmeier, Huffpost
Information & Media
The 80's did little to portray homosexuality, in and out of entertainment media. Schools didn't discuss it at all, and gay characters on television and in movies were often grossly exaggerated stereotypes - at best side characters, at worst killed off. Imagine the current struggle we face to have good queer representation in 2023 and make it 100x worse. Shows that did focus on LGBTQ themes were denied sponsors, which discouraged channels from airing them, which resulted in even less rep. Many queer folks in this era didn't discover their sexuality/gender identity until later in life because of this utter lack of representation.
There was also, of course, the AIDs crisis - and the lack of information about it. Cases had reached above the 1000s in the USA by 1983 and showed no signs of slowing down. President Reagan stayed quiet, no widespread funding or campaign was started to research how it spread, schools didn't offer education about it, and churches declared it a plague sent by God to strike down the "evil" homosexuals.
There were some attempts to educate the gay community about AIDs, such as the Can We Talk? pamphlet created by the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club, but from what I can find this was put out in the San Francisco area and not widely available.
With Hawkins being a small town in Indiana, it sounds like Will and Robin (and whoever else.....) would have practically no resources to learn about their community or the crisis it was going through, other than the highly biased newspapers and channels, whose headlines consisted of thrillers like "AIDS IS THE WRATH OF GOD", "MY DOOMED SON'S GAY PLAGUE AGONY", and "Trigger Gay Cancer Epidemic in U.S. - THE MAN WHO GAVE US AIDS" (all real headlines).
That's what they're seeing about being gay, if they're seeing anything at all.
The General Attitude
In 1987, 75% of the public in the USA believed same-sex relationships to be always wrong. There's an interesting article from 1999 declaring that Americans' attitudes toward homosexuality were increasing dramatically, with 61% of interviewees agreeing that gay people can be high school teachers, which was "up from 36% in 1989". 90% in '99 even agreed that we could be salespeople, up from 68% in 1977! What a great statistic! I hate it here.
So yeah, there was a fear that if you came out you wouldn't get a job. Makes it feel even worse that two of Robin's workplaces have been destroyed.
And of course, words like fairy, faggot, pansy, dyke, queer were thrown around like confetti, the go-to, fight-starting insults for anyone a little out of the ordinary. 'Queer' wasn't a fully reclaimed slur at the time, and still today, I encounter people online who lived through the 80s-90s and are uncomfortable with the word. Of course, the LGBTQ community was using these slurs in a reclaiming fashion through that time, but in a town like Hawkins where most LGBTQ folks are probably closeted, the words are mostly gonna be used with negative connotations by cisgender, straight people.
We see in the show that Will is referred to as a 'fairy' by Troy, and as a 'fag' by Lonnie. I'm sure he's heard other people call him these things, plus he's probably constantly hearing those words thrown around as insults to others, as is Robin.
Violence & Coming Out
Coming out in the U.S. can be scary in 2023, now imagine it in a time when a whole 3/4s of the public think you shouldn't have the right to love who you love (The Gallup Report found that support in the US for same-sex marriage was 71% positive in 2022).
"The 1980s, essentially, was a decade of sanctioned homophobia." - Homosexuality in the 1980s, kdh5409
The 80s saw the use of the activist mantra "Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are", but the majority of the public definitely didn't encourage it. If you wanted to come out, you had to consider everything. Do you want to join the military? Better not come out. Do your parents support Reagan's inaction? Better not come out. Do you have a school bully with violent tendencies whose favorite name to call you is "fairy"? Better not come out. Better to remain invisible than to be dead or disowned.
Some quotes from comments on this reddit post:
"Even jokingly being called gay could get you beat up." - B1GFanOSU
"I wasn’t even gay and I was bullied for four years as a lesbian. Why? I fell off a bunk bed and landed on a girls lap" - zeldasusername (That's bad enough, but imagine if she were a lesbian. You had to tread so damn carefully to not be outed).
"In urban New England in the 1980s homophobia was rampant; I didn't notice it in the same way that a fish doesn't notice water." - [deleted] (If it was bad in an urban area, imagine it in a small town...)
"High School in the 80's was all about being gay while not letting anyone know (officially) and taking a different route home from school every day to avoid being ambushed and beaten for the *perception* that I was gay." - slobeck (This commenter goes on to detail how they were thrown out of the house in 1987, and all that happened after. I recommend reading their full comment for a great perspective on the gay rights movement of the 90s).
So there was a lot of risk of violence, as you can see, no matter where you were. East coast, West coast, middle of the country, you were more likely than not to experience verbal and/or physical abuse.
In the context of Stranger Things, we see this through (again) Troy and Lonnie. But it's bigger than them. If a fundamental part of you puts you at risk of death, for safety, you have to assume the risk comes from all sides.
Furthermore, this risk is acknowledged back in season 1, when Hopper wants to know if Will is really gay. As we know, it can be inferred that he believes Will may have been hate-crimed, because that wouldn't be far-fetched. And I imagine that possibility only increases as Will gets older and his bigoted peers hear more misinformation about homosexuality.
Well, Why Wouldn't Will Tell Joyce?
Even nowadays, you can have the most loving, accepting parent in the world, and still be scared to come out to them (personal experience). But again, the social climate in the 80s made this worse.
1: Plain Ol' Internalized Homophobia.
If your dad is like Lonnie (derogatory) and all you see in the news is "queer people are dying and you'll be next if you don't watch out", you could a) have the self-protective response of telling yourself you're not queer, and/or b) believe that you're made wrong for being queer, and/or c) believe that your queerness could somehow hurt others if you talk about it. When gayness is treated as a disease, you don't wanna be the guy spreading it.
2: A small part of him believing that everybody inherently thinks gayness is wrong no matter what, because that's what he's surrounded by (*Slightly* different from plain ol' internalized homophobia).
Even if he accepts that he is gay (which I think he does) and doesn't personally believe being gay is bad (which I think he struggles with), because of the hatred he's surrounded with, he may find it hard to believe that Joyce could accept him. He may believe that even if she says it's okay, he's still disappointing her. Will doesn't want to burden his family, and after all the horrific things that have happened to him and his loved ones, coming out as gay may feel like tipping the scale too far.
(Okay, so it's not that different from plain ol' internalized homophobia).
What About The Party?
Though the members of the party are definitely some of the most accepting people in Hawkins, they are still surrounded by the same influences as Will. Additionally, they don't have the perspective of actually being gay (...most of them), so they may be more likely to fall for misinformation. While I don't believe any of them would react horribly to Will coming out, they may still say unintentionally hurtful things because they simply don't have the resources to know better. Will may also be afraid of reactions such as "So do you have a crush on me, or something?" or "No you're not, don't say that about yourself".
My reference: I know Gen Xers in real life who are accepting people, but still say some hurtful and stereotypical things because they never learned better. I also know the harrowing and mortifying experience of coming out to cishet friends.
Conclusion
I hope that made some semblance of cohesive sense. Overall, when theorizing for s5 and if you want to write period-accurate fanfiction, make sure to research the social climate. I did my best to include as much relevant information as possible without rambling too much. There is of course much more to say! Please let me know if there's anything you feel is missing or incorrect.
Thank you for reading!
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