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IMHO part of the issue is that America isn't a single culture. There's a big difference between the acceptance of LGBTQ culture between rural vs. urban, coastal vs. south, and pop culture vs. work culture.
There's also a major backlash against LGBTQ culture. E.g. I don't think that you can say that it is fully mainstream culture as long as we have the various Don't Say Gay laws and bans on gender affirming care.
This is highly dependent on context. In much of the world, it's dangerous to be openly sympathetic to LGBT causes, let alone openly LGBT. Even in much of the US, being openly gay is dangerous, and being openly trans is even more dangerous. A non-binary 16-year-old was murdered in Oklahoma this month; meanwhile, nobody's out here killing Swifties (at least, not yet).
That is an utter fabrication.
>Police in the Tulsa suburb have not released a cause of death but said this week that the teenager did not die as a result of injuries from the fight.
"Regardless of what the social landscape looked like for same-sex attracted or and/or conscientiously gender-nonconforming people fifty, thirty, or even fifteen years ago, at this point “queer” culture is anything but counter. You can buy its swag at Hot Topic—and at Target, for that matter. It’s got its own shelf at the bookstore, a category on Hulu, playlists on Spotify, and representatives in newsrooms and film studios. Nothing intrinsic to it interferes with the general program. It has been neutralized. A space has been provided for it."
"Counterculture became subculture and subculture became mass culture."
"the culture industry learned to neutralize and exploit radical elements, and how it may have become acclimated to anticipating and guiding their cyclical emergence."
"Today’s teenaged and twenty-something “blue hairs” will figure it out, in time—just as most of us learned that being punk or goth or metal or whatever else was essentially a paid subscription for a product line which we were sold on the pitch that we required it to give expression to the Authentic Selves that would otherwise be hidden under a bushel of blue jeans and polo shirts.
"But for the most part, it rather seems to me that most modern subcultures aren’t interested in pretending to be anything other than hobbyists, fandoms, and followers of fashion and influencer content. "
The risk of yesterday is greatly diminished; "being LGBT++++" is now mostly a process of buying the right pronoun pins from Amazon or Etsy before swinging by Target for an unironed pride flag before the Bank of America-sponsored "protest" march.
The gay and lesbian community that literally fought for basic rights is now being pushed out by a demographic that thinks anything but their idea of straight, vanilla missionary for the purpose of reproduction deserves a new gender. Gay men are basically straight men these days, especially among white kids who can afford to take university degrees that don't translate to jobs and would never be caught dead in a place resembling a 2005 gay bar. It's borderline cultural appropriation.
Most of the fighting occurred well before most of today's fashionable TIAQW@(#)SDFKLSJDF+ were born:
- DSM removed homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973; WHO in 1990.
- The rainbow flag first flew in 1978.
- The lessons of the hyper-aggressive response to the AIDS epidemic have all but been forgotten among the "blue hair & pronoouns" crowd.
- Netherlands legalized same-sex marriage in 2000.
- Lawrence v. Texas was 2003. Obergefell vs. Hodges was 2015 (nearly a decade ago).
If you attend a pride event, even in mostly white areas, you'll quickly realize that the majority of people there are not white.
I can't say the same for a certain class of white, know-it-all college kid who insists I must be a semihemidemiqueer or somesuch because I can both iron my own clothes (no man can do this) and change a tire (no woman has ever succeeded).
I'm old enough to remember a time when women were allowed to enjoy beer and football and men were allowed to like wine and TV dramas, because fuck gender roles and stereotypes. Now, we hold the stereotypes constant and assume we must have a oh-so-special gender because I like wine and beer, hate TV dramas, tolerate baseball, and can change a tire and iron my own clothes.
It's poorly-conceived bullshit, and no number of secret downvotes or unreproducible social science studies will convince me otherwise.
It's rich privledged kids, man. Not white kids. Just like crime is not colored kids, it's poor kids.