LGBTQ+

There's also a reason most of the really awful stuff comes from religious rather than secular communities. Not only do religious communities often thrive on the type of repression you're talking about - usually ratcheted up to truly insane levels - opposition to the existence of LGBTQ+ people has become a central pillar of the Christian identity in a lot of places, especially in the American/Evangelical space. It's an aspect I don't think gets talked about enough, in that if LGBTQ+ people were to vanish tomorrow, many of these religious sects would just fragment and fall apart immediately. Gays are the external "enemy" and the glue that's holding them together. It's especially true of Evangelicals.

As a teenager/high school student in the mid 2000s, I was a full bore, "god hates f-gs," white-shirt-and-black-tie Bible thumper. I lost my religion in 2008. As my religious indoctrination failed, I went from thinking about LGBTQ+ people every single day to never thinking about them at all. Literally in the span of a month, the amount of my headspace that the gay community occupied went from substantial to zero. That's how hard a lot of religious communities were (and still are) leaning on generating hatred for the gays to prop up their entire religious organization.

That's not to say that the religious indoctrination issues were completely without permanent effects. I've basically never been able to form normal human romantic relationships because of it and that deep-seated repression is still there. Fast forward to the last two years and I've come to the realization that I'm considerably less straight than I thought I was - whoops! - but that never even factored in before.