Is Nothing Sacred? This column admittedly relies mostly on secondary sources for material, but every so often your roving reporter makes a shocking discovery with his own eyes and ears, as happened at the gym the other day. Earbuds are ubiquitous at gyms these days, but a few of us still prefer to hear what’s going on in the world, including the music they pipe in. Then it happened: a song came on with the main lyric “I’m going out,” sung to the tune of the 1980 hit single “I’m Coming Out,” which was first recorded by Diana Ross and soon became the unofficial anthem of the LGBT rights movement. There have been other songs called “I’m Going Out,” but this new hit version (recorded by Steve Aoki, Sam Feldt, and xandra) follows the exact melody of “I’m Coming Out” and almost seems to parody its lyrics, which famously declare: “I’m coming out/ I want the world to know/ Got to let it show. … There’s a new me coming out.” The new song describes a bad breakup, but the singer won’t let that keep her down (or at home): “So I’m going out/ I’m gonna dance along/ Till I let you go/ I’m going out/ to get you off my mind/ love myself tonight.” So instead of reaching out to the world to tell one’s truth, the singer is plotting her passive-aggressive revenge in the form of good times at the club? Times really have changed. Deconstructing People From its first day in office, this Administration has been on a crusade to deny the existence of transpeople by erasing any reference to transgender issues from official government documents and historical records. The impulse seems to be of a piece with the Nazis’ policy of eradication of Jews and homosexuals, culminating in their physical extermination in the camps. But what if they could have accomplished the same result with the simple stroke of a pen? Why not a bureaucratic solution that eradicates a people’s identity by wiping them off the books, as it were, much as Stalin “vaporized” his enemies by erasing any trace of them, rendering them as “unpersons”? In modern lingo we might say that a personal identity is deconstructed thereby, proof that social roles like male and female are cultural creations rather than eternal truths. As an ideology, social constructionism tends to be associated with lefty politics and postmodernism and Queer Theory. As a vision of the future, it’s a hopeful one if indeed we live in a world where the arc of history bends toward justice. But what if we do not?
Everything Must Go! Speaking of bureaucracy, which sociologist Max Weber understood so well, the propensity to apply uniform standards across the board is bound to produce catch-22’s and other absurdities. In its frenzy to purge any reference to transgender issues and a broad range of “gay” topics, the regime seems to have gone after it with a pretty crude knife, searching for individual words à la Google 1.0. Thus, for example, they became a laughingstock when it was noticed that suddenly references to the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, were disappearing from Department of Defense websites (along with photos of the bomber itself)! Anyone named “Gay” was also fair game, and biologists reported that information about certain fish had been expunged due to references to gender. The complete list of bad words has not been released, but apparently anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is on the hit list. The DOD alone is reported to have earmarked 26,000 historical images and online posts for deletion, but that number could go much higher. Soon enough, the Algorithm will discover that the U.S. Constitution contains all kinds of suspiciously DEI-sounding words, and off it will go.
Reality Bites Back Flying in the face of these attempts at erasure comes a large study of 14,000 Americans with the finding that almost ten percent now identify as lgbtq+, a record high. The Gallup survey was first conducted in 2012, when that total was just 3.5 percent, and it has been rising steadily by the year—to 9.3 percent in 2024. The best news is that the proportions vary greatly by age cohort, with Gen Z adults—born from 1997 to 2006—coming in at over twenty percent lgbtq+, compared to the Silent Generation (born before 1946) at under two percent. Back to the overall survey, the fact that the “straight” slice is down to 86 percent is another way to look at it. And lest there be any doubt that this has “political” implications, the party affiliations of “the ten percent” vary greatly, with lgbtq+ respondents accounting for fourteen percent of all Democrats, eleven percent of Independents, and just three percent of Republicans. Of course, it may be that Republicans are more reluctant to come out on a survey, but clearly there’s a lot of self-sorting as people gravitate to the party perceived as better reflecting their interests. That being the case, the growing proportion of adults who identify as LGBT can only be good news for those hoping for a democratic resolution to the current crisis.
Voting with One’s Feet Self-sorting by party is what voter preference is all about, but a more recent trend adds a geographic dimension to the shuffle. We’ve known for decades that LGBT people tend to be disproportionately concentrated in large cities, and the reason is simple: they moved there from small towns and suburbs to enjoy the benefits of urban life. But now LGBT people are moving from “red ” to “blue” states expressly to flee the draconian anti-gay laws in the former in search of a more tolerant environment. A study published by the Trevor Project and the Movement Advancement Project focused on young adults (under age 24) and estimates that some 266,000 have relocated to a more inclusive state for this reason. Transgender and nonbinary youths were especially likely to have moved, with many more saying that they’ve considered doing so. Indeed a similar trend has been observed for other groups as people on the move increasingly choose their state of residence according to its “redness” or “blueness.” It has been said that America’s “cultural civil war” could never become an actual civil war because there are no geographic divisions analogous to the North and South. But never say never.
