This is, quite literally, the best and safest time in the history of the US to be openly LGBT. This sounds like a reddit comment. I suggest getting offline for a bit and actually spending time with other people in real life.
This is a common sentiment that misses the point. Human happiness isn't based on how good or bad things are in absolute terms, it's based on whether things are getting better or worse.
It's not so great if you're a lesbian, unfortunately. Female-only dating and social spaces have been almost entirely eradicated, and women who complain about this get endlessly harassed.
Same-sex marriage wasn't nationally legal until 2015. How can you say that social conditions for LBGT people in America are worse in the present than in the past? Maybe if you're only looking in the past few years, but zoom out to view a few decades and it doesn't make sense. What qualifies as extreme anti-LGBT rhetoric today was very mainstream 20 years ago.
It is just a symptom of youth and social media addiction.
I forget what the stat was in 1999 but it is something absurd. Like 90% of the US was against gay marriage. In 2022, 71% were pro gay marriage.
I am gay and when someone says bullshit like this is just drives me crazy. As if a gay person in high school today can possibly relate to my experience of being gay in high school in the 90s. It is such an ignorant statement and view.
I came out online in the mid 90s and in rural MI in 2000. I also find this maddening and frankly it feels kind of like gaslighting. Corrective rape/assault and violent reactions to my sexuality were things I had to seriously consider every time I met new people/was in a new place/in a new situation. Now I generally don't have to worry that if I tell someone I'm gay they'll beat me up or try to 'fix' me. They might make comments or give me a look, but I don't have that fear of people finding out like I had growing up.
If someone was born post-AIDS (so roughly age 40 and below), they'd have gotten to see things slowly improve until 2016, when they started sliding back.
I really doubt there are statistics to back this up. More likely, the number of people consuming rage-bait (drawing attention to the worst) on social media such as reddit has done up.
Without such social media, an asshole yells abuse in a store and it ruins the day of 20 people in earshot. With social media, it gets uploaded and viewed by 20,000 people.
How many have you seen? How many have you 'seen' on social media?
As for laws, I really think you're missing the bigger picture. Anti-LGBT people had the law on their side a few years ago much more than today (and accordingly, they had less reason to protest.)
Please have some perspective ("touch grass", if you will). I live in one of the most socially conservative states in the union and there are openly married gay people here, gainfully employed and forming a part of society.
Meanwhile, in a full third of all the countries in the world, homosexuality is still illegal (sometimes punishable by death), and the majority of the world population still thinks homosexuality is wrong. There's about twenty in the world that are more friendly to "queerness" than the US[0] -- mostly monoethnic white countries with a couple of exceptions.
You may also be surprised by how socially conservative nonwhite people in this country are in general; even less than a decade ago, the majority of black Americans did not support gay marriage[1].
A leading candidate for the 2024 US presidential election has made a campaign promise to make healthcare that I rely on virtually illegal. Dozens of representatives in congress have cosponsored a bill that would make it illegal to even teach doctors about this form of care. I would not survive without this care. Things may be worse in the rest of the world, but if healthcare I rely on is taken away then there is no way I will stay in this country.
Moving to a heavily blue state may be a better and far cheaper option, they are holding the pro-queer line for the time being. Judging historically on blue states' treatment of some other issues like immigration, I don't expect them to cooperate with any anti-queer laws on the federal level.
> Judging historically on blue states' treatment of some other issues like immigration
Blue states don't have a great history on those other issues, either. Oregon literally prohibited black people from entering its territory. The last Major League Baseball team to integrate was the Red Sox. A quarter of all present-day blue states have never elected a black person to the House of Representatives, and another quarter have only ever elected one.
Actually, even today, most professional athletes point to Boston as the most racist city they'll play in. "Sanctuary cities" in blue states like Chicago and NYC are pushing refugees out to the comparatively redder suburbs right now. In the meantime, college-educated black people are moving back to the South.
Point being, differences are only felt in the extreme margins; red states and blue states are just the difference of 49% vs. 51% one direction or another on almost every divisive issue.
This is a perfect example of first-world privilege in display. I'm really jealous that people live in such good places that anti-queer rhetoric is their major problem.
