The remarkable success of “Heated Rivalry,” the steamy new television series about closeted gay hockey players, has been widely taken as yet another sign of social progress — evidence that acceptance of queer love continues to grow.
We wish we could share that optimism. Unfortunately, new research that one of us, Professor Charlesworth, helped conduct reveals a darker truth: The decades-long rise in the acceptance of gay people in the United States peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then. The popularity of “Heated Rivalry,” it seems, is a welcome burst of enthusiasm for gay life in a new era of anti-gay prejudice.
This reversal stunned us. In the two decades before 2020, visibility, recognition and legal inclusion of gays and lesbians progressed in lock step — larger and more prominent Pride parades, rainbow-lit landmarks, federal legalization of same-sex marriage. That progress translated into something remarkable: Americans’ bias against gay people declined faster than any other bias ever tracked in social surveys.
Research led by Professor Charlesworth and published in 2022 detailed this decline.
Read on to learn about this frightening turn of events…
(Source: New York Times)
