You’ll find the same thing in poorer regions of the US.
This is correct, but I also believe you see this in more middle class areas as well. This sort of thing is almost impossible to prove, but I think a lot of middle class suburbanites do sort of carry a lot of homophobic attitudes but they just keep it to themselves. Because over the last decade it’s become socially unacceptable in a lot of the social sphere to be outwardly homophobic. Personally I think a lot of Americans are just bottling up their homophobia and god help us if fascism takes hold, because all that bottled up homophobia will definitely break out.
It wasn’t that long ago (like mid-2000s) that polls showed a majority of Americans felt homosexuality was immoral. In the 15-20 years since, I highly doubt that hardly anyone say age 35+ at the time who was already homophobic has changed much, they’ve just been keeping their mouths shut.
I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and i had a ton of homophobic and transphobic brainworms i had to work through in spite of being bi and trans myself. Are there people who just don’t say anything out loud anymore because they don’t want to be shamed for it? Yeah, absolutely. Lots of cishet people aren’t fully honest with me and just play nice because they don’t want to cause a scene. But there’s also lots and lots of people who have genuinely become better, more accepting people and that’s honestly not all that surprising. All queerphobias are learned responses. There’s nothing genuine about them. People have been trained to reflexively feel the hate and disgust because that was the socially expected thing to do. If they fully realize that, it’s easy to discard these fears once they lose their purpose of being a mandatory part of somebody’s gender performance. Without that, there is simply no reason to be queerphobic anymore.
This is correct, but I also believe you see this in more middle class areas as well. This sort of thing is almost impossible to prove, but I think a lot of middle class suburbanites do sort of carry a lot of homophobic attitudes but they just keep it to themselves. Because over the last decade it’s become socially unacceptable in a lot of the social sphere to be outwardly homophobic. Personally I think a lot of Americans are just bottling up their homophobia and god help us if fascism takes hold, because all that bottled up homophobia will definitely break out.
It wasn’t that long ago (like mid-2000s) that polls showed a majority of Americans felt homosexuality was immoral. In the 15-20 years since, I highly doubt that hardly anyone say age 35+ at the time who was already homophobic has changed much, they’ve just been keeping their mouths shut.
I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and i had a ton of homophobic and transphobic brainworms i had to work through in spite of being bi and trans myself. Are there people who just don’t say anything out loud anymore because they don’t want to be shamed for it? Yeah, absolutely. Lots of cishet people aren’t fully honest with me and just play nice because they don’t want to cause a scene. But there’s also lots and lots of people who have genuinely become better, more accepting people and that’s honestly not all that surprising. All queerphobias are learned responses. There’s nothing genuine about them. People have been trained to reflexively feel the hate and disgust because that was the socially expected thing to do. If they fully realize that, it’s easy to discard these fears once they lose their purpose of being a mandatory part of somebody’s gender performance. Without that, there is simply no reason to be queerphobic anymore.