Long discussion of weather wigger was a valid and real class of people is one of the more ignorant things I can remember us kids discussing growing up in neighborhood of gritty white auto workers. We weren't poor, our dads had boats, took hunting trips and could own several different nice guns. We knew that we weren't middle class like the folks on TV (at least not until Rosanne and we didn't really understand Archie Bunker) but we wanted to be better than somebody. I also remember playing smear the queer in our boy scout pack, not one adult ever batted an eye at us gleefully smearing some queers. I know gay men who remember smearing queers and they never thought a thing about it until I brought it up decades later, homophobia was the air we breathed. It's so different from the world my child inhabits. I paid a lot of attention to the news as a kid. I remember Reagans welfare queens and Willy Horton. I loved the word intefada (feels good in the mouth) and wished I could wear a hat like Arafat. I guess I'm musing.
We probably have a couple dozen people passing through the birth center every year who would have been hunted like Matthew Shepard when I was a kid. We've got a long way to go but we've come so far? I mean, we didn't just play smear the queer? I had to hide a drunk buddy from the cops because he trashed a gas station with the excuse that "the cashier came onto him." Legit Nazis. There were the skinheads who weren't that racist and then there were the skinheads that oh my holy fuck most definitely were. Back when men were men and swastikas were in ballpoint on denim jackets. That's why they're mad. This is what we took from them.