Stop panicking about homophobia The future will be gayer than ever

Are we descending into dark times? Given recent media reporting on gay rights, you’d be forgiven for thinking that is exactly where we are headed. Commentators warn of an anti-liberal revolt within Western democracies, one fuelled by populism, online radicalisation, and a younger generation of men allegedly drifting away from hard-won norms of tolerance. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has called rising homophobia and racism “the elephant in the room” which is destroying British society.

Claims that homophobia is “surging” particularly among young men are proving promising fodder for clickbait publications as well as for fundraising drives by LGBT advocacy groups. The non-profit GLAAD has warned of a steady uptick in anti-LGBTQ incidents. This, in turn, seems to be causing unnecessary worry: Stonewall has claimed that less than half of LGBTQ+ people feel safe holding their partner’s hand in public.

The good news is nearly all of such claims of a growing homophobia “epidemic” in Western countries are completely unfounded. The bad news? Correcting this sort of narrative requires careful attention to survey design, trend interpretation, and definitional changes, precisely the kind of work that most readers and much popular media will not do.

Here’s an example. Last month, PinkNews reported that “men born in the 2000s are far more likely to hold conservative views on LGBTQ+ rights compared to previous generations”. This narrative was picked up by other media outlets and spread across social media. Soon a flurry of speculation on potential causes erupted on social media. Is this because of incel forums and far-Right propaganda? Have trans issues caused a backlash against the LGBs? Are we entering a new era of Christian traditionalism?

For those asking if there was any truth behind the original premise, the short answer is no. It’s true that PinkNews based their article on credible research undertaken by Dr Ryan Burge at the American Institute for Boys and Men. Yet Dr Burge’s research was not about generational attitudes towards homosexuality; instead it looked at how changing religious views correspond to gender. When I contacted Dr Burge about the PinkNews reporting he called it a misrepresentation. “The Pew Religious Landscape Survey data does not indicate increasing homophobia among young men,” he clarified. Any apparent difference amongst young men today and previous generations “is almost certainly a methodological artefact, not a real trend”, he explained to me.

But the “take economy” allows no time to carefully sift through the numbers. Content-oriented media outlets like PinkNews are structurally incentivised to privilege speed, moral urgency, and emotional resonance over careful methodological scrutiny.

No surprise, then, that PinkNews has distorted data before. In response to UK Home Office figures last year which indicated that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes were down for the second year in the row, the news site claimed they were false statistics. PinkNews’s argument wasn’t just that hate crimes are chronically underreported (which they certainly are), but that the Met Police’s data, which covers most of London, was excluded, and thus “likely under-represents national totals for LGBTQ+ hate crime”. The implication was that actual hate crime numbers could be skyrocketing.

This conveniently leaves out why the Met Police’s data was excluded last year. A flaw in the previous system meant that hate crime “markers” which applied to one offence could be automatically applied to all offences within the same incident. As a result, Met statistics from 2021 to 2024 had overstated the number of hate crime offences. Even with that inflation, LGBTQ+ hate crime numbers had continued to decline. Perhaps things really aren’t as terrible as PinkNews would like them to be?

We can’t only blame the journalists, though. Sometimes researchers on homophobia oversell their conclusions. In a recent New York Times guest essay, psychologists Dr Tessa Charlesworth and Dr Eli Finkel argued that apparent cultural progress in gay acceptance — reflected (for some reason) in the widespread popularity of gay hockey show Heated Rivalry — masked a far more troubling reversal in public attitudes.

According to Charlesworth’s research, “the decades-long rise in the acceptance of gay people in the United States peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then”. This conclusion was based on large-scale survey data which captured implicit and explicit social attitudes in the US. Between 2021 and 2024, anti-gay bias had risen by around 10%, with the trends being “distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25”.

Again, the data is misleading. Far from supporting the implication that young Americans are driving a new wave of homophobia, the reported “increase” in anti-gay bias amounts to a modest proportional rise from historically low baselines. It’s not a return to earlier levels of hostility. Even after the post-2021 uptick, Gen Z and Alpha remain the least anti-gay cohorts in absolute terms: they show the lowest average anti-gay/pro-straight bias scores compared with their elders.

So what is the real story about social attitudes towards gay people in Western countries? Long-running attitude surveys, which continue to offer the strongest evidence of social change, reveal that a persistent majority accepts, not merely tolerates, gay relationships.

In the United States, Gallup’s long-running Values and Beliefs polling shows that Americans’ acceptance of gay or lesbian relations has increased markedly over the past two decades. In 2001, only about 40% of US adults said same-sex relations were morally acceptable. That proportion rose steadily to a high of 71% in 2022. Since then, the trend has evened out to roughly 64% across the past few years.

Approval of same-sex marriage in the US has followed a similar trajectory. When Gallup first asked the question in 1996, only about 27% of Americans said same-sex marriage should be legal. By 2004, support had grown to around 42%, and in 2011 it reached a majority for the first time, remaining above 50% into the early 2010s. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, support continued to climb, reaching around 70–71% in Gallup polling in 2022–2023. This year, in subsequent surveys, support plateaued at around 68%.

The plateauing of social attitudes in these surveys is sometimes framed as a “backlash”. However, the flattening of trend lines after a period of rapid social change is actually the norm. Attitudes rarely move in a straight upward line indefinitely. Once a broad social consensus has formed, gains tend to slow down and fluctuate within a narrow band year-to-year. We see identical trends with acceptance of divorce or moral permissibility of sex outside of marriage, both of which showed long plateaus once majority approval was reached.

One survey in the UK has been asking about the acceptability of same-sex relationships since 1983. According to the British Social Attitudes’ latest report, attitudes toward same-sex relationships have transformed over the past four decades. In 1983, 17% of adults said a sexual relationship between two people of the same sex is “never wrong”; by 2022 that number had risen to 67%. As expected, those who said such relationships are “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9% over the same period. Other surveys, like YouGov Polling, have found similar results.

By all accounts, despite the headlines, gays and lesbians in Western countries have never been more accepted. It’s important to pause and reflect on just how rapid this moral victory has been. In 1988, the year I was born, the UK Parliament passed Section 28 of the Local Government Act, prohibiting local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” — a measure with widespread support. A year earlier, The Sun published an article entitled “Fly away gays – and we will pay!” offering free one-way plane tickets to Norway to gay activists so they could leave the country for good. Such a world now seems unimaginable to us.

Creating a narrative of rising homophobia without solid evidence also causes real, tangible damage. Research about “minority stress” shows that anticipated violence and perceived stigma significantly contribute to anxiety and are associated with rising rates of depression. These effects do not require an increase in experiences of homophobia; they require only the belief that homophobic experiences are likely. When the underlying data is ambiguous, “rising homophobia” narratives risk intensifying perceived danger and worsening distress unnecessarily.

We gays and lesbians should be celebrating our victories, not indulging in panic over dubious numbers. Ignore the doom merchants, the future is brighter — and gayer — than you’ve been led to believe.

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