Queer people are everywhere. When they’re not presiding over whole countries (see Luxembourg and Serbia’s heads of state), they’re dominating the Billboard Hot 100 for months at a time like our boy Lil Nas X. A whole bunch of them are playing pivotal characters in the iconic, Emmy-winning series Pose right now, and are dominating magazine covers too.
Right now, we’re supposedly living in a queer utopia, in which young people’s futures are being nurtured by progressive politics and a new-found acceptance from mainstream culture.
Just a decade ago, the surface-level scenario seemed different. Interpretations of queer people on screen were sanitised, one-dimensional and, more often than not, white. (Friends, for example, didn’t even include a same-sex kiss in their ‘The One with the Lesbian Wedding’ episode).
Meanwhile trans people were either victimised or the butt of a joke; like Lieutenant Lois Einhorn in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. We needed a new wave of liberal young minds to help dismantle those ideals. For the most part, we have them now.
But while the general outlook looks positive — a study commissioned by GLAAD showed that Americans over the age of 72 were more accepting of LGBTQ+ people now than they were just a year ago — the demographic we thought held the key to instigating change in future seem to be the ones most likely to turn their backs on the community instead.
In fact, data gathered by the LGBTQ+ anti-violence charity Gallop found 1 in 4 Britons under the age of 24 thought the community was “immoral”. The same demographic also thought they were a danger to society, or that homosexuality went against their own beliefs. This is compared to one in five people in older age groups given the same survey.