*"Americans are turning against gay people."

[d.anders]

nytimes.com

WWW.NYTIMES.COM

A worrisome OpEd in today's New York Times.

[+ José Soplanucas]

 

@d.anders

There is a paywall. Would you copy and paste, please?

Edited Monday at 02:03 PM by José Soplanucas

[Luv2play]

Especially striking is the finding that anti gay bias is increasing amongst the younger folks.

[d.anders]

4 hours ago, José Soplanucas said:

There is a paywall. Would you copy and paste, please?

I'm sorry about that. They are cheap bastards, for sure. The article is rather long, and it's a copyright issue to copy. I wouldn't want the board to incur a fine. The article starts by talking about the success of Heated Rivalry, so maybe someone on the internet will copy it or blog about it.

53 minutes ago, Luv2play said:

Especially striking is the finding that anti gay bias is increasing amongst the younger folks.

I guess it may depend on where you live. Young people in NYC seem very cool to me. I suspect a lot of experimentation goes on here. How else do find out who you really are?

[+ Vegas_Millennial]

1 hour ago, Luv2play said:

Especially striking is the finding that anti gay bias is increasing amongst the younger folks.

This has been happening for a decade, around the time transgender bathroom issue became key issues in public high schools: 

 

 

Edited Monday at 06:39 PM by Vegas_Millennial

[marylander1940]

1 minute ago, Vegas_Millennial said:

This has been happening for a decade, around the time transgender bathroom issue became key issues in public high schools: 

 

 

I knew it would backfire!

[+ Vegas_Millennial]

1 hour ago, Luv2play said:

Especially striking is the finding that anti gay bias is increasing amongst the younger folks.

It makes sense.  Schools are pushing the issue sooner and sooner, and younger folks are getting overloaded with it so they're likely to rebel against the messaging.

Edited Monday at 06:58 PM by Vegas_Millennial

[DenverDad]

Related:  

LGBTQ+ Americans are going back in the closet under Trump | Advocate.com

WWW.ADVOCATE.COM

---

Nearly half of LGBTQ+ adults (47.5 percent) report being less out somewhere in their lives over the last 12 months.

 

[+ Lucky]

NY Times allows me, as a subscriber, to gift articles:

Opinion

Guest Essay

Americans Are Turning Against Gay People

Jan. 19, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

Credit...Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

By Tessa E.S. Charlesworth and Eli J. Finkel

Dr. Charlesworth and Dr. Finkel are research psychologists who study bias and political partisanship.

The remarkable success of “Heated Rivalry,” the steamy new television series about closeted gay hockey players, has been widely taken as yet another sign of social progress — evidence that acceptance of queer love continues to grow.

We wish we could share that optimism. Unfortunately, new research that one of us, Professor Charlesworth, helped conduct reveals a darker truth: The decades-long rise in the acceptance of gay people in the United States peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then. The popularity of “Heated Rivalry,” it seems, is a welcome burst of enthusiasm for gay life in a new era of anti-gay prejudice.

This reversal stunned us. In the two decades before 2020, visibility, recognition and legal inclusion of gays and lesbians progressed in lock step — larger and more prominent Pride parades, rainbow-lit landmarks, federal legalization of same-sex marriage. That progress translated into something remarkable: Americans’ bias against gay people declined faster than any other bias ever tracked in social surveys.

Research led by Professor Charlesworth and published in 2022 detailed this decline. Drawing on 7.1 million responses from Americans collected from 2007 to 2020, the researchers tracked both explicit bias (how people answer questions like “To what extent do you prefer straight people over gay people?”) and implicit bias (more automatic responses inferred from how rapidly people associate words, such as “straight” with “good” and “gay” with “bad”). Across every U.S. state and demographic group, anti-gay bias plummeted — by roughly 75 percent on explicit measures and 65 percent on implicit ones, on average. Forecasting models suggested that, at that pace, anti-gay bias could hit zero as early as 2022.

One of us, Professor Finkel, is a host of a podcast called “Love Factually,” which analyzes romantic movies in light of scientific research about relationships. Last June, in an episode about the 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain,” which depicts a love affair between two cowboys, Professor Finkel cited Professor Charlesworth’s 2022 research to make a hopeful point: “There is still a slight preference for straightness over gayness, but it is getting very close to zero.”

But at that time, the Charlesworth research team was analyzing new data showing that anti-gay bias had begun to rise. The analysis of an additional 2.5 million responses from Americans collected from the beginning of 2021 through 2024 revealed that progress had not only stalled; it had reversed. In just four years, anti-gay bias rose by around 10 percent.

Increases also appeared in bias toward Black, darker-skinned, older, disabled and overweight people, but not as starkly. Just as bias against gay people fell especially steeply before 2020, it has surged particularly sharply since.

Perhaps most surprising is that these trends were distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25. This group increased its animus against marginalized groups in general and gay people in particular at a faster rate than older Americans did. Also surprising is that although anti-gay bias has risen faster among conservatives, it has also risen among liberals.

What explains this decline in tolerance? At the moment, we don’t know. But the evidence suggests that we can rule out two common hypotheses. The first is that the anti-gay backlash is a side effect, or spillover, of the backlash against the movement for transgender rights. If that were so, you would expect increases in anti-trans bias to be meaningfully correlated with subsequent increases in anti-gay bias — which the research does not show.

The second hypothesis is that the anti-gay backlash reflects the rise in moral panic language about sexual grooming, the notion that gay adults are recruiting or influencing children to become gay. But the research shows no evidence of spikes in grooming discourse (measured through Google searches) that are meaningfully correlated with subsequent spikes in anti-gay bias.

If asked to speculate on the cause of the rise of anti-gay prejudice, we would point to two related factors. The first is social instability. Starting around 2020, the United States experienced a sustained disruption consisting of the Covid pandemic, economic strain and intensifying political conflict — each of which has been linked to heightened intergroup hostility and scapegoating. This would explain the overall rise in bias against marginalized groups.

The second factor, which would explain the rise specifically in anti-gay bias, is anti-establishment sentiment. The sustained social disruption since 2020 has fueled resentment and a loss of confidence in institutions perceived to have failed — governments, corporations, the broader establishment. By 2020, support for gay and lesbian equality had become an establishment position. Corporate America, for example, demonstrated a concrete commitment to gay rights, with companies donating hundreds of thousands of dollars for Pride celebrations and other efforts at gay and lesbian inclusion.

Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken, especially among younger generations grappling most intensely with uncertainty about their future.

Which brings us back to the exuberance surrounding “Heated Rivalry.” The recent rise of anti-gay bias suggests that public attitudes and media representation are no longer moving in lock step. At a time when social advances can coexist with backlash, watching queer stories on television can feel comforting. But comfort on the couch is not the same thing as progress.

 

 

[+ Vegas_Millennial]

4 hours ago, DenverDad said:

Related:  

LGBTQ+ Americans are going back in the closet under Trump | Advocate.com

WWW.ADVOCATE.COM

---

Nearly half of LGBTQ+ adults (47.5 percent) report being less out somewhere in their lives over the last 12 months.

 

I have been less vocal about being gay in my workplace the last few years, but not because of reduction in DEI.

I don't mind my friends knowing what sex I prefer to date.  I just don't want new acquaintances to associate me with some of the less tolerant and more vocal stereotypes associated with sexual minorities.

Edited Tuesday at 12:17 AM by Vegas_Millennial

[+ José Soplanucas]

Thank you, @Lucky! Super interesting! Plus, I am glad the article directly addresses and discredits one of the easy explanations that some posters shared. 

The hypothesis towards the closing would explain not only the raise in anti gay feelings but also in racist and misogynistic ones, but fails to explain why the raise in anti gay bias is the sharpest. 

[d.anders]

1 hour ago, Lucky said:

NY Times allows me, as a subscriber, to gift articles

Thank you for doing that. My subscription is a gift, attached to someone else's account. I have no idea what that does or does not allow. I'm glad you were able to do it.

[Lotus-eater]

I'm skeptical of their explanation. If there is more political conflict, why would young liberals scapegoat gays, who are mostly on their political side? Likewise, why would young liberals who are anti-establishment scapegoat gays in particular for their grievances when corporations support all sorts of causes (or maybe they blame the gay mafia of Tim Cook, Peter Thiel, Pete Buttigieg, etc. for the high cost of living)?

(As for the explanations they reject, one main link between hostility to trans and gays is the increase in criminal attacks on both. I don't know how they address that link specifically.)

Edited Monday at 09:44 PM by Lotus-eater

[Monarchy79]

Thanks for posting this discussion point. I live in DC, and all summer and fall, droves of middle school and high school students visit the museums,  as I see them getting on an off the tour busses, over 60% of them are wearing that infamous souvenir….That Red baseball cap I’m not allowed to describe on this forum. They’re starting young with their homophobic, racist and misogynistic ideologies. Not surprised to see any of this.
 

From the “Red Pill” movement, to the “Incel” movements , Young Heterosexual American White Men feel disadvantaged, and “want their country back”, and lust for the “good ole days”, their elders talked to them about, basically when there was no equality, no civil rights and when his white male heterosexual privilege was all he needed to thrive in life. 

This new crop of American young hetero men are now being impacted for being average in many ways, and they can’t take it. They have to actually compete for jobs (against women, blacks, and gays),  and they hate it. They have to actually be worthy of dating or marrying a woman, who no longer needs a man to survive, and have to be accountable for his own actions. 

The wet dream of having a subservient housewife who can’t get a bank account in her own name, a job where you can slap your secretary on the butt, get a blow job from a hooker for lunch, wash the pussy juice down with bourbon before heading back to a work day of doing nothing, while dumping all the work on a “negro”, with twice the education, but who isn’t allowed advancement, is what they see as  the dream that may come true. 

This is all linked together. The gays, the blacks and women. And just like how the civil rights act of 1964 helped all these groups; what this country is trying to get back to, is throwing the gays back in the closet, the women back into servitude, and blacks back to Jim Crow. 

This is why misogynistic and racist gays are so problematic. They see what they want for themselves, but can’t see the bigger picture. 

[Lotus-eater]

2 minutes ago, Monarchy79 said:

Thanks for posting this discussion point. I live in DC, and all summer and fall, droves of middle school and high school students visit the museums,  as I see them getting on an off the tour busses, over 60% of them are wearing that infamous souvenir….That Red baseball cap I’m not allowed to describe on this forum. They’re starting young with their homophobic, racist and misogynistic ideologies. Not surprised to see any of this.
 

From the “Red Pill” movement, to the “Incel” movements , Young Heterosexual American White Men feel disadvantaged, and “want their country back”, and lust for the “good ole days”, their elders talked to them about, basically when there was no equality, no civil rights and when his white male heterosexual privilege was all he needed to thrive in life. 

This new crop of American young hetero men are now being impacted for being average in many ways, and they can’t take it. They have to actually compete for jobs (against women, blacks, and gays),  and they hate it. They have to actually be worthy of dating or marrying a woman, who no longer needs a man to survive, and have to be accountable for his own actions. 

The wet dream of having a subservient housewife who can’t get a bank account in her own name, a job where you can slap your secretary on the butt, get a blow job from a hooker for lunch, wash the pussy juice down with bourbon before heading back to a work day of doing nothing, while dumping all the work on a “negro”, with twice the education, but who isn’t allowed advancement, is what they see as  the dream that may come true. 

This is all linked together. The gays, the blacks and women. And just like how the civil rights act of 1964 helped all these groups; what this country is trying to get back to, is throwing the gays back in the closet, the women back into servitude, and blacks back to Jim Crow. 

This is why misogynistic and racist gays are so problematic. They see what they want for themselves, but can’t see the bigger picture. 

Nothing you say explains the sudden reversal of the trend starting in 2020 that the authors highlight.

[+ José Soplanucas]

1 hour ago, Lotus-eater said:

Nothing you say explains the sudden reversal of the trend starting in 2020 that the authors highlight.

Same can be applied to you and your friends in agreement with you. You project your prejudices in an exercise of wishful bigot thinking without any prove. Behind the article author's there is actual research that seems to proof you wrong. Indeed, we should ask for more sources about that research, but what are your sources to back your own explanation?

[Lotus-eater]

25 minutes ago, José Soplanucas said:

Same can be applied to you and your friends in agreement with you. You project your prejudices in an exercise of wishful bigot thinking without any prove. Behind the article author's there is actual research that seems to proof you wrong. Indeed, we should ask for more sources about that research, but what are your sources to back your own explanation?

I didn't offer an explanation, so you need to work on your reading comprehension. I offered a criticism of their explanation based on their own data, namely, that the trend reversed even among young liberals. They would need to show me a clear link between anti-corporate attitudes and anti-gay attitudes, which their data does not show directly and they admit it's speculation (their data only casts doubt on the alternative explanations mentioned).  All you have to offer is cheap mood affiliation.

Edited Monday at 11:50 PM by Lotus-eater

[Monarchy79]

2 hours ago, Lotus-eater said:

All you have to offer is cheap mood affiliation.

And all you have to offer is smug arrogance, deflection to “data”, and insult.

Quite sophomoric, and expected. 

[mike carey]

Moderator's Note

Gentlemen, please refrain from entering a political debate. This thread is about emerging trends in LGBTQ+ acceptance levels, not a debate about the merits or otherwise of the current rights that exist or how they were attained.  Some comments have been hidden while the moderators review them.

[caliguy]

If young people were actually becoming more anti-gay, it would be really strange to see nearly 30% of Gen Z today identifying as LGBTQ.

This NYT article reads that resistance as prejudice, but the NBC data suggests something more complicated is going on.

Nearly 30% of Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ, national survey finds

WWW.NBCNEWS.COM

---

About half of the Gen Z adults who identify as LGBTQ identify as bisexual, according to the Public Religion Research Institute report.

 

[+ SirBillybob]

I’m gay but Canadian. Any insights on what age group or specific category, locale, or orientation of Americans or American adjacents I should be wary of in terms of direct toxic impact on me as an old queer? Full disclosure: essentially never in USA, but wonder where particularly it might be prudent to be less out. 

Edited Tuesday at 09:15 AM by SirBillybob

[DenverDad]

IMHO, unfortunately it isn't cut and dried as saying "avoid these states or these regions because every one there is anti-gay" or "these places are 100% safe".  You find acceptance and hatred everyone to differing degrees.  However, I think you are safer in most larger coastal cities (NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, Portland Seattle) plus places like Chicago or Denver.

Of course, YMMV

[+ SirBillybob]

Can’t read the actual PDF preprint, 50 pages, as I would typically, and it keeps crashing out upon zooming in to charts. First time this problem; I download papers all the time. I would want to see the full temporal data compared to that excluding the latest period. Not just the pre /post comparison. The extended earlier period saw such a marked decrease in negative bias that the latest ratings may somewhat reflect statistical ‘regression to the central tendency’ artefacts. Expected upward and downward bias variation here and there over the full time could be obscured if baked in and could be extant equally or similarly to latest trends. 10% adjustment to 75% isn’t huge. Also, outlier scores either direction need to be analytically excluded to reconcile regression and younger age group collective bias scores may have been dragged negatively by a very small proportion of that age demographic. Again, I have to be able to view the data!! The devil is in the details.

Edited yesterday at 12:28 AM by SirBillybob

[+ purplekow]

Many people sat at home during the pandemic and stayed on the internet and had a government that was not particularly inclusion friendly.  When people sit and stew about their lot in life, those who are different suffer.  The question becomes why am I suffering because of the Chinese virus?  Why can't I go out and socialize when I bet there are homosexuals having all kinds of sex?  People were in small groups of like minded people and unhappy and that brings blame to the surface.  

In addition, behavior is cyclical.  A drop of 70% with a subsequent rise of 10% gets one to 33%/. Still much better than it was, just not as good as it when it was at its best.  So, while this is a trend worth watching, the numbers are not likely to reflect an accurate picture of how bad things are.  

[+ SirBillybob]

The measures are quantitative changes by percent in continuous variable scores of Implicit Association Test, not percent population proportion changes on an arbitrary categorical binary. If an average score drops from, say, 100 to 25 and rebounds to 27.5 then the previous net change is nullified by merely 3%… no?. And that is constant from any randomly chosen baseline.

These data are amenable to inferential parametric statistics … I don’t know if they did that … and grade of clinical significance predicated on what proportion of standard deviation is represented by score changes … did that? IDK. No hints in the abstract.

Edited Tuesday at 11:52 PM by SirBillybob