Call me an alarmist, but I can see it coming. I've said time and again that once they get tired of rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants, they're going to turn on gay people (they're already doing it to trans people). They will trot out the old lies that we're child molesters and "groomers" and deviants and encourage violence against us and eventually start rounding us up; look what happened to the Japanese Americans during World War II, except I don't think they'll stop at just interning us.
Well, I'm probably a bit naive and I realize these things aren't always unpredictable -- I think the ruthless stuff ICE is doing is surprising even MAGA types -- but so far I don't see huge red flags for gay people. Trans people, of course, are a different thing. I think people find transgenderism confusing and icky and nonscientific and threatening and possibly fake and all kinds of other things. But I feel like they're much better at accepting gay people because they can relate to them in most ways. Gay people want to marry the ones they love, for instance, and straight people can understand that desire. I haven't heard anyone say anything overtly homophobic for a long time (if you don't count the fuss about drag queens and "grooming," which I suppose you probably should count).
I realize that when we started talking 20 years go (!!! I still can't get over that number), marriage equality, which wasn't even being widely called marriage equality yet, seemed extremely unlikely. And Matthew Shepard had been murdered just a few years before. And I live in a partisan bubble, of course, both socially and geographically. But nowadays I see same-sex marriage, for example, becoming so mainstreamed that average centrist people kind of casually accept it, even if they don't share it.
A guy I work with at the paper just became a columnist. He's smart and likable and knowledgeable and I think readers will probably enjoy his columns. A lot of them are about local government and things like that. In the one I just read, he casually mentions his husband. I'm sure lots of people -- myself included, tbh -- may pause over that and think about how shocking that simple offhand statement would have been throughout much of their lifetimes. But those people are, well, dying out, and in their place are young people who think nothing of homosexuality and are even pretty pro-trans and nonbinary (again, I'm basing this on what I've seen living in very blue city and not super red state, but it includes my experience a few years ago visiting a high school in a bland suburb for a story about a theater production and having *all but one* of the five or so students the teacher gathered for me to talk to identifying as they/them, or he/him when they did not look biologically male). So who knows. Trump did not win in a landslide, despite what his supporters like to think/say. That said, though, he and Stephen Miller are using terrifying policies in attempts to suppress choices they don't like and keep Americans for objecting to them. Today's scare was seeing a reference to their sending military to Los Angeles, "the first of the blue cities" where supposedly they will try to do the same.
