NYT's Decade-End Chart

Embiggen or view in full-screen here. Out of 120 items recounting memorable moments of the decade, no mention of marriage equality, Prop 8, or LGBT rights at all. The one gay-ish item is a reference to Brokeback Mountain. Maybe there are two gay-related items, they do mention Lady Gaga.

Number Of Openly Gay Elected Officials Nearly Doubled In The Last Decade

The New York Times says that instead of same-sex marriage, a better barometer of public opinion on homosexuality is the decade's avalanche of openly gay elected officials. Currently there are at least 445 gays and lesbians holding office, an increase of almost 200 in the last eight years.

Some political scientists say the rise in openly gay candidates’ winning public office is a better barometer of societal attitudes than are the high-profile fights over same-sex marriage. “Gay marriage ballot measures are not the best measure,” said Patrick J. Egan, a political scientist at New York University who studies issues surrounding gay politicians. “They happen to be about the one issue the public is most uncomfortable with. In a sense, they don’t give us a real good picture of the opinion trend over the last 30 years.”

For instance, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has been polling people since 1973 about whether homosexual behavior is morally wrong. In 1973, 73 percent of the people polled described it as always wrong and only 11 percent as “not wrong.” By 2006, those saying homosexuality was “always wrong” had dropped to 56 percent, and 32 percent said it was not wrong. One reason for the shift in attitudes, some political scientists contend, is a rising number of gays acknowledging their sexual preference openly in various walks of life, from workers on factory floors to Hollywood stars.

Obsolete In The Naughties

Huffington Post has posted a list of a dozen items made obsolete over the last decade. On their list: hand-written letters, the Yellow Pages, dial-up, landlines, CDs, classified print ads, encyclopedias, catalogs, film cameras, and fax machines. I still use a landline and fax machine for work every now and then, and very occasionally play or purchase a physical CD. But otherwise, yeah. To that list I'd add stereos/boomboxes, tube TVs, and travel agents. I kid, I love my travel agent readers!

The Decade In LGBT Rights

Matt Foreman, director of Gay and Immigrant Rights at the Evelyn & Walter Haas Fund, points us to a just-released report (PDF) called A Decade of Progress on LGBT Rights. The report is a joint project of Foreman's group and the LGBT Movement Advancement Project (MAP). The extensive report lists the advancements and challenges in LGBT rights over the last ten years. Positive developments:

• Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation: The number of states outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation increased 83 percent, from 12 to 22, between 2000 and 2009. The percentage of the U.S. population living in states banning discrimination based on sexual orientation soared from 24.5 percent to 44.1 percent, an 80 percent increase. In other words, today 134 million Americans are now living in states where discrimination based on sexual orientation has been outlawed, an increase of 65 million over the decade. (When local nondiscrimination laws passed by cities without statewide protections are included, the figure is over 50 percent of the U.S. population.) Fortune 500 companies that protect workers based on sexual orientation grew from 51 percent to 88 percent.
• Discrimination Based on Gender Identity: There was an even more remarkable increase in states outlawing discrimination based on gender identity and expression, which rose from just 1state in the year 2000 to 14 states representing nearly 30 percent of the population in 2009. The percentage of Fortune 500 companies that protect workers based on gender identity jumped even more, from just 0.6 percent to 35 percent.
• Relationship Recognition: Similarly exceptional gains were made in the area of family recognition. In 2000, no state extended the freedom to marry to same-sex couples; one state gave broad recognition to same-sex relationships and one offered limited recognition. Now in 2009, five states extend marriage to same-sex couples (with New Jersey and the District of Columbia pending at press time), six offer broad recognition, and seven offer more limited recognition. Overall, the number of Americans living in a state that offers some protections to same-sex couples nearly tripled, from 12.7 percent to 37.2 percent.
• Protection from Violence: The 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act is the first federal law to specifically protect LGBT people.
• LGBT Elected Officials: The number of openly LGBT elected officials in America rose 73 percent between 2000 and 2009, from 257 to 445.
• Public Opinion: The percentage of the public supporting the right of openly gay and lesbian people to serve in the military grew from 62 percent to 75 percent. Support for marriage equality has grown from 35 percent in 2000 to 39 percent today; there has been an even larger increase in support for relationship recognition that involves many of the rights of marriage, from 45 to 57 percent.
• Safer Schools: In 2000, only one state had a safe school law that specifically cited sexual orientation and gender identity/expression for protection; by 2009 that rose to 13states. The number of Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs in high schools grew from 700 to 4,700, a nearly six-fold increase.

Negative developments include the successful movement to ban same-sex marriage in 31 states, the increased incidence of homophobic harassment in public schools, the rise in HIV rates, and the near-doubling of military expulsions due to DADT. Embiggen the image at the left for a numerical look at the overall state of the movement. MAP also provides an interactive overview of 12 critical LGBT issues tracked in each state.

The Worst Songs Of The Decade

This month the Village Voice is counting down the worst songs of the Aughties. Some acts to make the list so far: Simple Plan, Weezer, Santana, and Crazy Frog, whose evil spawn from 2007 is below. The reviewer notes: "Every generation gets the Barbie Girl it deserves. As horrible as we've acted this decade, we should actually consider ourselves lucky to get three minutes of dead-eyed European house music with chipmunk voices going 'gummy gummy gummy gummy gummy bear.'" I'm pretty sure I posted The Gummy Bear Song here when it came out. Yes, it's completely horrible. And I just played it three more times. I denounce myself.

One-Hit Wonder Of The Decade

Billboard Magazine has named Daniel Powter the one-hit wonder of the decade for his 2006 song Bad Day, which took Powter to #1 on the pop chart for five weeks in 2006. I had never heard this song until now.

The Decade In Seven Minutes

Newsweek unspools the major stories of the last ten years. From Y2K, 9/11, and Dubya to Obama, the swine flu and Michael Jackson.

RELATED: Calling this last decade "the noughties" (or "the naughties") never really caught on, did it? What the heck will we call the decade that starts in five weeks? The "teens" don't get here for three years.