Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)