I talked to an older relative from the Soviet Union about gay marriage and she told me that on the one hand, it seems strange that something she had been raised to view as a mental illness was now getting official recognition, but on the other hand there were always people like the two nice guys she used to work with who were best friends, lived together, and never found the right women to marry...
(She did work in a metallurgical plant but those guys were probably engineers rather than burly steelworkers.)
She also said that she didn't like the Chinese engineers sent to visit her plant because they smiled too much. A similar thing happened when my family came to the USA, before we got used to things here. I recall my mother being bothered that a cashier had smiled at her because the cashier didn't know her and had no reason to be happy to see her.
