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Is there a youth backlash brewing against LGBT?
I came up out of the subway the other day, and nearly my entire field of view was filled by a massive glowing screen full of flapping pride flags, wall-to-wall and six feet tall. It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month. I've been so burned out by the sight of that flag everywhere that the only reaction I can muster is "maybe stop being so obnoxious about it then?" From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?
A long tweet from sci-fi author Devon Eriksen claims that pride month is downstream of the "toaster fucker" problem, in reference to an ancient greentext. Condensed: the internet brings together people with bizarre niche interests (what he calls "toaster fuckers" — he claims it's meant to be a general term but he's clearly writing about the LGBT theater of the CW). A supportive online community stops these people from leaving the toaster in the kitchen and adjusting to the normal world around them, and instead these online groups metastasize, eventually spilling over into the wider world: intra-group status competitions start with "who can fuck the most toasters", lead to "'toaster-fucker pride' bumper stickers" and then "bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too" and "swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking."
I think I agree with some of that description but not all of it, and may write it up in another thread if I get time, but it's not so important for this post. I need it as context for the bit that I think is more accurate: the normies getting fed up with all the toaster-fucking, the backlash, and the response (lightly edited to concatenate multiple small tweets, but no words changed):
I think this explains the split in normie opinion pretty well: red states have had more than enough and that's led into the various legal battles that Devon alludes to, school choice advocacy, campaigns to replace progressive school boards, etc. I don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue), but even the memory of such events in the semi-recent past could explain normie "I want to be a good person so I'll call myself an ally"-ism. Compare the number of "racist hate crime" hoaxes over the past few years, to the point where "the demand for racism exceeds its supply" has become a dark joke among cynical online commentators. I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents (certainly none as badly as Jussie Smollett did), but it seems useful for a group to have opposition to keep its supporters energized ("our work is not yet done!") and I could definitely see obnoxious pride month displays as accidentally serving this function.
Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes. Lime, a scooter rental company, made a pride-flag crosswalk in Washington a 'walk-the-scooter' zone after several teenagers were arrested for leaving skid marks on it. I saw a recent comment on a gaming subreddit (sorry, I can't find it), in response to yet another pride-month-themed mod, saying something like "don't be discouraged! 50% upvotes for a pride mod is pretty good these days". But when I interact with university students, the discourse is still very pro-LGBT: they talking about being excited for pride events, etc.
So, questions for the floor:
"Fabricate" is the wrong word, but the Obama administration passed a law against anti-LGBT hate crimes which was widely referred to as the Matthew Shepard Act. Matthew Shepard was a drug dealer who was murdered by a couple of rival dealers, and there is zero evidence that homophobia played any role in his death (he'd had sex with one of the men who murdered him).
I don't have a good source for this offhand, but I'd heard that the deal is, the rival dealers' defense lawyer convinced them to argue that the attack was a homophobic hate crime because he thought it would get them a lesser sentence than a drug deal gone wrong. Not sure if that was a good idea then, but apparently the story got legs and next thing you know, it's the Standard Accepted Truth.
Both the standard and Jimenez's counterstandard histories seem... more than a little fuzzy, if you start digging into them.
((The trial court blocked the 'gay panic' defense before it was presented; a lot of the assumptions of anti-gay animus derive from it being presented at all, as well as some pretty pathetic sequences from Aaron McKinney during questioning.))
McKinney claimed years after the trial that he did not know Shepard, and was just looking to rob someone, and that the gay panic defense was partly something he came up with and partly his defense attorney, but at best that's the jailhouse word of a self-admitted meth-raging liar. Most of the claims that Shepard and either attacker had previously had sex come from 'Doc' O'Connor, the operator of a 'limo' service (coughcough: with a lot of sex work ties), but Jimenez's actual quote is that "Matt may have been one of the guys in back with Aaron... I can't say for sure", where the same man previously claimed to have only met Shepard once only days before the attack (and longer after the supposed car hookup), and if you start digging into other media coverage for O'Connor he alternates between knowing nothing and having been deeply involved in the personal lives of not just Shepard but also McKinney and his wife, and many of the stories are contradictory.
There's pretty strong evidence (if second-hand) that Shepard used drugs, including pretty hard drugs like meth, and some evidence that he was at least in a few degrees of contact with people who moved the drug through Colorado, but it's not clear where he fell on the lines for selling or reselling. A lot of people game-of-telephone Jimenez's account into certainty that Shepard was moving ten thousands of dollars in meth (cfe Reason here), but the actual claim in the book is a little different.
The implication is that Shepard actually had or could get access to that much meth, but Jimenez never really ties it down further than one of McKinney's methhead friends boasting on the matter, and said friend, while never naming who that "another dealer" was, later points to a married man, ie not Shepard. Instead there's just insinuations about some regularly scheduled run from Denver, where someone would move ten thousand bucks of meth and be paid a few hundred dollars in meth, and it could have been Shepard. The quotes claiming genuine knowledge of Shepard selling anything, rather than mere belief, instead point to stuff that could be courier, small-scale resale, or even (heavy) personal use, not of knowing or long-term control.
On the flip side, investigators didn't test either attacker for recent drug use, so the alternative story of a meth-rage is pretty hard to prove or disprove, either. The official story conveniently places McKinney's last binge just long enough ago to remove even withdrawal as a motivator, and it seems to be based on little more than whatever an investigator could pull out of their ass. And there was little contemporaneous attention paid to how deep shit McKinney seemed to be in with his own suppliers, or even investigation of those suppliers. Jimenez points regularly to the possibility of either intentional ignorance or even outright assistance by police in the drug trade, and there's enough gaps in the official investigation that it doesn't look wrong, either, and that's knowing the extent that vice tends to be compartmentalized. Shepard seems to have gotten set on a bit of a pedestal, post-mortem, and while part of that's trying to avoid blaming-the-victim, part of it does seem focused around presenting a nearly perfect innocent for the story.
My gutcheck points more to something messier in the mix.
A lot named people in Jimenez's book claim McKinney was at least gay4pay, and that's a lot of other quotes that point to him as also self-closeted or genuinely doing it out of addiction. And there's pretty strong evidence that McKinney and co were looking for cash or drugs in anyway or form, not least of all that they did steal Shepard's wallet. McKinney was almost certainly desperate enough to fuck or fight someone for a hit, probably expected people at the particular bars he scoped out to be more likely have cash or drugs, and might (if we're trusting O'Connor) have suspected Shepard to have some cash or drugs, and targeted him specifically because of that, though in turn we have little reason to believe he had good reason to believe Shepard had drug-dealer amounts of cash.
But someone who's gay4pay isn't exactly immune for homophobia, especially if they genuinely were doing it for the cash (or drugs) or self-closeted, including violent homophobia -- especially at the time, there were a lot of hangups over what 'really' makes someone queer, many esoteric even within the gay world. But even were a methhead to turn a plan for a seduction or a 'simple' robbery or into a fatal beating because the methhead didn't bottom, it's hard to separate that from a methhead being a methhead who might have gotten set off for any of a thousand other things.
But that is just me pulling it from my gut.
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