I Hide In The Closet.

I was so deeply closeted that I couldn’t even see the light through the crack in the door. Finally the stress of hidden because too great and it looked like people were more accepting so I stuck my toe out the door.

We were always here but hiding in the closet.

More Visible L.G.B.T.Q. People Isn’t a Curiosity or a Crisis — It’s Normal

New York Times

By Jane Coaston

July 20, 2023

What’s the correct number of lesbians? Gay men? Bisexuals? Trans people? Is there a number that is too high? Too low? Just right?

Every year, Gallup releases a survey of how many Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The 2023 edition found it was about 7 percent. That percentage has held relatively steady over the past three years, but it is about double the percentage in 2012 (3.4 percent). Perhaps most notably, the number of transgender Americans has increased, as has the number of people who identify as nonbinary.

A lot has happened over the past decade, a lot of it to the benefit of L.G.B.T.Q. people. This is the best time in American history to be L.G.B.T.Q., with the proviso that the bar for such an achievement is incredibly, unspeakably low. Marriage equality is now the law of the land, and more people know someone who is trans now than they did a few years ago. Many people now live in public, too, sharing their lives on social media with strangers. There are more visibly L.G.B.T.Q. people because there are more visible people, period.

But that visibility has produced a very strange complaint from some critics. L.G.B.T.Q. people are OK in theory, they seem to argue, but there are simply too many of them.

Why the increase in LGBTQ+ people coming out? Well I have my own theory, I think that there are two driving forces.

L.G.B.T.Q. people are, of course, no strangers to public antipathy, the voices that seem to see the rising number of L.G.B.T.Q. people as a sign of a deeply decadent culture or even a dying civilization. But what makes this form of criticism seemingly novel is that it focuses on quantity rather than quality.

Even seemingly straightforward descriptions of the statistics can get overheated quickly, something as ephemeral as following a trend (like bisexuality, according to some outlets) or as widespread as a social contagion.

The increase in visible trans people is factual, of course. There are more out trans people — and trans young people — today than there were 10 or certainly 20 years ago, which makes sense, given that 20 years ago even the idea of legalizing same-sex marriage on a national level was a wedge issue so contentious that it may have helped tilt key races. But treating the increase as a diagnostic craze or cause for concern implies that there is a trans set point of sorts, a correct number of people who are permitted to be trans.

My theory is that there is more public acceptance of us and more people feel that it is safe to come out. Back before the Stonewall Uprising you could get arrested, lose your job, be ostracized from the community but now it is relatively safer.

Isaac Schorr put it similarly in National Review: “To suggest that social suggestibility could be playing a role in the skyrocketing numbers of young girls’ expressing their desire to become males, for example, is not of course to say that gay and transgender people would not exist without these topics’ being discussed in the public square. It’s only to say that people, and especially young people, are susceptible to being influenced on all manner of issues, especially when the arguments they’re hearing come from people in positions of authority — such as teachers — and are presented as truth.”

It all fits into place when you realize that these right-wing nits still believe being LGBTQ+ is a choice. It all fits in with their “Grooming” philosophy, if we are born this way all the grooming nonsense makes no sense.

There’s been an objective increase in the number of visible L.G.B.T.Q. people in the past decade. But the discomfort with that visibility isn’t an objective fact of life. There is no maximum number of people on earth who can be trans before we face civilizational ruin or planetary collapse. This is the first time in American history that gay and trans people have been able to live as themselves in any real way, with jobs and marriages and dogs and cats and visibility. And when others panic about rising numbers and fret about what causes people to be trans (or queer in general), the not-so-hidden message is that repression might be necessary to stop them, as if the temptations of trans life were too alluring otherwise and might entice “normal” people too much. Yes, more people are trans now than they were a few years ago. And that’s … normal.

The second part of my theory why there are more visible LGBTQ+ people is because those who were content to live in the shadows are now coming out and giving the right-wingers the finger…

I am here! I am queer! And I’m in your face!