this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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I'm inclined to think that the primary reason is how sexually repressed the average person is.
I'm thinking of it this way:
The average person hides their kinks, and normalizes the utter segregation of sexuality from life in general in rhetoric. Obviously life isn't separate from sexuality, therefore any display of mainstream sexuality from which there's no hiding, is deemed non-sexual. Hyper-sexualized tv shows, sexualization of young people, cishet couples walking hand in hand or even kissing publicly are ignored to a large degree. Of course there are puritans out there but we're talking about the average person here.
When all this contradicting behavior pushes the cognitive dissonance to unbearable degrees, the average person looks for a target to lash out, to blame for the stress their own sexual repression creates within them.
As a result, the sexually repressed average person can't see, hear or think about any aspect of the lgbtq+ community without their own sexual urges boiling over like an overfilled pot of soup. They think the difference between themselves and the openly out members of the lgbtq+ community is that the average person knows how to keep their kinks, fetishes and sexuality to themselves, while the lgbtq+ community makes a culture out of showing off theirs.
They literally can't understand being lgbtq+ isn't a kink or a fetish, nor is it solely based on sexual expression, because their own sexual expression is normalized into everyday culture for everyone to see 24/7, thus a gay couple walking their kid to school in the morning is no different to them than themselves getting a footjob on the sidewalk next to the school.
At least this is my two cents.
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.