Someone I follow on Twitter shared that he was in a pub last night in England. It was not a gay bar, it was just a pub. On his way out following a pleasant evening, he was attacked for being a “faggot” and a “homo.” The problem of hatred against gays did not disappear when the legality of same sex marriage was asserted by courts and parliaments in many countries.
I think back to 2015, when I was moving out to Phoenix from Minneapolis. I stopped for the night to visit my sister in Albuquerque, where she lives with her husband. I hadn’t realized how much she has changed her views about gays and lesbians since moving from San Francisco to Albuquerque, but her husband is a Fox-watcher. I get along fine with him as long as we don’t steer into politics.1 She surprised me when she said she was interested in Trump, in large part because with an amosphere of open discussion about politics.
Our dinner table, nine people, was a daily Chautauqua. Our parents were teachers, so they didn’t discourage us from thinking out our ideas. Dad was a Nixonian Republican and Mom was a McGovern Democrat, and the Vietnam war was on TV. This sister and my older brother were organizing peace marches in our little town, and I am sure that many of the residents were amused that we had commies in ripped jeans and miniskirts yelling about napalm. So, when she told me that she was thinking that Trump should be the Republican candidate, I was confused.
Not that she might vote Republican, I mean, people change their political views over time. My own dad did when Reagan was president. He did a flip to being a liberal anti-war Democrat and by the time Bush 2 came along he had a high time making jokes about W. No, I was confused because of Trump’s methods of campaigning. He displays the classic tactics of a name-calling bully. Each candidate during the primaries was a target of his stupid nicknames as soon as they moved close to him in the polls. More than one of my Republican friends claimed that the Trump campaign was orchestrated by the Democrats close to Hillary Clinton to make sure that she had a weak opponent. So, this is why I was confused. She’s always been keen on defending the bullied.
During that visit, we went on a hike through the desert hills behind her house. Gorgeous place, full of cacti and mesquite trees. While I was keeping a sharp eye out for rattlers and scorpions we chatted about stuff, and the topic turned to San Francisco where she had lived for 30 years prior to New Mexico. She said “I don’t understand what they want. Why do they have to keep on marching and talking about rights? They have marriage now.” I replied that gays and lesbians just want to be able to rent and buy, work and play, enjoy life and not have to worry about getting the shit beat out of them.
The conversation changed directions there, and I don’t recall to what. But, she had been living in San Francisco during the White Night riots, which started when Dan White was acquitted of killing Harvey Milk and George Mosconi using the food additive defense. White plead insanity caused by eating too many Hostess Twinkies, and the preservatives were blamed for his murderous rage. Gays and lesbians rioted because Milk had been an organizer for gay and lesbian rights, and especially after Anita the Orange Juice Lady Bryant had made some statement or other than homosexuals didn’t deserve Florida Orange Juice because they’re evil.
When I first moved to San Francisco my sister was out there already and gave me a place to stay while I caught my bearings. She helped my move into an efficiency at Pine and Polk,2 one of the gay districts close to the Tenderloin, and across the street from Sukker’s Likkers. She had never expressed any sort of anti-gay sentiment during the time that I lived there, and we even went down to Market St. for the first Pride Parade after White Night. She thought that the Dykes on Bikes were pretty cool, and Sister Boom Boom was great.
So, why was this anti-war and anti-bullying woman now supporting Trump and implying that gays are going too far in demanding more rights?
Can’t tell you, but I can guess.
Lesbian punched and thrown to the ground in a violent homophobic attack
There is still an undercurrent of suspicion against gay and lesbian activists, and they are still an easy target of hatred. The damage that continues to be done by transactivists tying themselves to lesbians and gays, has shifted the focus away from the struggles that the LGB community still face in being recognized as actual fully-fledged people with, and onto the belief that the trans ID males are the “most oppressed” people on earth. They are now getting all of the sympathetic kindness, while those lesbians and gays are kicked to the curb. Not only are lesbians and gays deprecated in favor of transactivism, when they set up their own advocacy organizations separate from trans activists, those groups are designated “hate groups.”
The LGB Alliance needs police protection due to harassment and “protests” when they run their conventions. There are very strong statements from “LGBTQIA2+” allies that there can be “No LGB without the T,” and that any movement towards separation is by definition hateful.
Transactivism demands primacy, and while LGB activists seek to have attention to the dangers they still face, and the protections and rights that they still need in law and in the public mind, there is another danger.
By inclusion, whether by choice or by pressure, in the LGB community, transactivism has played into the hands of the religious conservatives who warned against the “slippery slope.” In the minds of religious people who think that homosexuality is a sin, all of the actions towards transgender medical affirmation of children that are being pushed by medical and pharmaceutical companies, and through the schools that now teach about gender identity as science, is a result of the granting of the rights of gays and lesbians to get married.
There is an anti-gay backlash to the narcissistic “me first” push of trans ID males coming, and that’s added on to the underlying homophobia that’s never subsided even through the heady says of 2014 and 2015 when the tide seemed to be turning towards acceptance that real people who have normal needs and desires are born with sexual desires that are based on the same sex as their own.
With the cross-dressing story hours, with the secret affirmations of teens in the schools, and with boys enabled to shower with girls in high school gyms, the conservatives will gain traction against those hard fought gains that LGB campaigners made. Gays will be paying for this backlash in getting beaten just for being gay. Lesbians already have men demanding that they accept trans ID men as lesbians with dick and are shamed for having a “genital fetish of vaginas” for not wanting sex with men. We had a word once for sex that was coerced by social or physical pressure and we seem to have forgotten what it means. Straight men will see this and take it as a “green light” to try to push lesbians to have sex with them.
There are no lesbian bars left that can exclude men. This won’t get any better. Lesbians who don’t want men are pushed out of pride parades.
LGB(T) allies who see stories of gay-bashing, especially those of us who are straight, need to recognize that the rights of gays and lesbians are tenuous at best, and can be pulled back by laws and courts. We need to push back against transgender bullies and tell them that they need to let LGB organizations form, that they don’t need to be in every crevice and corner of society. We need to reinforce that we can’t be defined as being right-wing bigots when we push back against such bullies.
My sister isn’t a gay-basher, but her questioning is a sign of the tenuous nature of LGB gains. Be alert to this for the sake of gays and lesbians who are going to be run back through the gauntlet.
Again.
We almost got into it one Thanksgiving discussing abortion. This was shortly after “Veritas” media cooked some video to make it seem that a Planned Parenthood doctor had admitted to selling foetal body parts from aborted babies. I somehow managed to explain about the editing without showing my anger.
I’m still shaken at times when I think of how close I lived to the violence in 1983. A gay man who lived on Polk street near me, and we had said “hi” to each other on occasion, was found beaten to death shortly after I moved to the Mission District. Even though I can’t say he was a friend, he was an acquaintance. Murdered due to hatred.
It has always been far more difficult to be Lesbian/Gay than "Trans". This doesn't surprise us. The trans rights activists, not the trans people, are doing way more harm than good to all of us. It's a victimhood movement that needs to be disavowed by all! They are dangerous, violent, mantra-chanting religious zealots simping for trans people as their last bastion of hope for getting rid of that INCEL label. Not gonna happen.
Thank you for the thoughtful article.