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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:
Devon's tweets are terrible. Even for a conclusion his audience already believes, the arguments appear to just be made up. And unfortunately he's very talented at making things up, as the popularity of his book shows. Take this lovely tweet:
"Fascism is when boring normie dullards make it illegal to be weird, then kill all the bright, creative, and interesting people out of knee-jerk tribalism and fear."
That is bad! It's not fascism, though. Fascism was not normie. It was very weird. It attracted some of the best artists and intellectuals. You write sentences like this when your motivation is "I want to OWN my twitter enemies", and not "I want to understand fascism, the political ideology".
The same thing applies to this thread. There just nothing there beneath a series of insults. Reading it literally, the toaster-fucker problem's blamed on the internet. So the internet existing is a necessary condition for today's LGBT weirdness, because it's necessary for social status games to cycle into irrationality. But irrational social fads are not at all new, and the LGBT thing is less intense and insane than some past ones, such as disputes between or within religious sects over abstruse religious doctrine. Even the LGBT movement was as weird in the past, with many activists also pushing to remove the age of consent. And since excessive competition over status signals has always been a human tendency, does this theory actually explain anything? There are clearly patterns to 'wokeness' - historically oppressed minority sexualities, minority races, etc - and this theory doesn't tell us why the bureaucratic caste would become obsessed with those instead of another of the ten thousand niche internet communities.
Sure, this has happened in the online gay community, like it has in the online fishing community and online retro video game community. This is part of why the online gay community is so weird. We wanted to explain why the 'bureaucratic caste' is so pro-gay, though.
This is a well written snipe, but if we unpack the analogy it's not really true, we're ignoring the differences between different "they"s. The person from the previous quote, say a gay dude who competes to get the most likes on photos of him tied up while getting fucked by two other guys, is not actually 'swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking'. He's referencing trans kids there, but trans evangelism to trans kids happens because of (probably false) beliefs like - trans kids are being repressed by society - introducing them to the idea will help them be their true selves and prevent suicide - etc. This memeplex, and the fact that it perpetuates itself, isn't explained by 'toaster-fucking'.
This is clearly implying a general anti-gay backlash, but as other comments point out this isn't happening! The minor decreases in LGBT-support for gen z are within the margins of error.
... And then the premise here isn't true, so the conclusion isn't either. There's no huge anti-gay backlash, hate crimes are decreasing, and yet allyship goes way up! If the number of people who are strongly anti-gay is much smaller than it was before the internet existed, it doesn't make sense to attribute causation to "toaster-fucking" for this. There are real explanations here, ones that depend on the particulars of LGBT ideas and "oppression", but this isn't it.
And then, atop this collapsing foundation, the solution: "be normal". But we can trivially observe this doesn't work - the whole phenomena to be explained is that many people, otherwise normal people, are strangely enthused about being LGBT allies, and this happened despite being in contact with many other normal people. Or does he mean that it's the "toaster-fuckers" who need to be normal - that they need to stop posting about their sex lives online, and then a few years later suburban moms will stop putting up LGBT flags? Really?
The whole thing doesn't work. The picture it's painting is a disconnected series of vibes.
Have you contemplated the idea he is speaking to normies in normie speak because normies have been conditioned to reflexively bristle when hearing 'fascism' ?
Yeah, sure, some of that's true. However..
Remember San Francisco gay choir scandal?
Sex interest based online communites .. are kinda getting a little out of control. There are certain things that probably shouldn't be promoted because they're not good for individuals or society. I mean, how do you feel about 'stupid sluts club' ? Cool ? Maybe, if you're not into monogamy. What about a place that sexualizes smoking? Or drug use..
... I guess but this fully collapses all moral distinctions about 'lying' or 'being factually correct' into a friend/enemy binary, which one could do, but I prefer higher standards than that? And anyway the people who RT his tweets so that I see them are definitely not normies, they are smart enough to know better. Same for this place. Like you do have a point, but Devon's tweet was posted here, we're smarter than this, it's not like it's a republican tv ad
This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that. It is simply unreasonable to attribute that to genuine desire to brainwash your children. I and many others here have said worse on the site we copied the code for this one from or in private.
No I think it's reasonable to find cnc vacuum bed hypno piss play concerning. But the point of the post was to explain the general obsession with being a pride moth LGBT ally. That's just a different thing, it has different causes, they can't be explained with a gesture at some other somewhat related bad thing.
I remember all the “conservatives pounce” headlines from the Gray Lady and her friends making this argument, but I’ve never bought it. Consider a world where, say, the chair of the Texas RNC or whatever puts out a pro-Trump campaign video where they say “When we win the election, we’ll go stage a little putsch, / Suspend your sad democracy and voting rights and such”. You know, to make fun of liberals’ overblown fears of a Trumpian self-coup. Do you really think that progressives like the San Franciscan choir and their defenders would accept this as just a wee bit of humor poking fun at their neuroses, rather than a serious Threat to Our Democracy?
EDIT: I realize that I forgot to clearly make my point: if you’re in a position to do things that other people think are bad, and you state “hey, we’re gonna do those things that you think are bad”, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously. And those people would be right to wonder whether you’re just joking or going “haha, only serious”.
You'd have a point if the chair of the texas DNC put out this video. But it's a choir. It's a bunch of random people singing. The Texas Lutheran Choir singing a song about how kids should go to christian schools isn't a threat to democracy either.
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Isn't this just a classic Poe's Law case? To me, for example, the original choir line reads as clearly self-aware, but things like Trump's comment about suspending the constitution does not... but it's also quite possible that Trump's comment was self-aware, but the choir line was not. It's an internet communication problem endemic to the medium. Unfortunately, there's not a good solution, because "humor" can encompass many things, and sometimes people find the same statement humorous in different ways, and sometimes it's not even humor to start with!
Issues like this have led to my dad forgoing sarcasm altogether, though he loved it; and also, in theory, this forum doing the same, though sadly we can't help it too much if Twitter leaks in as "evidence".
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