Russell T Davies, creator of the British TV series Queer as Folk and the current showrunner of the BBC phenom Doctor Who, says gay society is facing dire peril ever since the presidential election of Donald Trump in November, 2024.
“I’m not being alarmist,” Davies told the British newspaper The Guardian. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”
Davies said the rise in anti-LGBTQ hostility is not limited to the United States, where Trump has signed various anti-LGBTQ executive orders, many geared to diminish and seemingly eradicate the transgender community.
Rather, he notes, anti-LGBTQ sentiment has become more pronounced in the United Kingdom in recent years. That hostility appears to be part of a larger backlash against LGBTQ visibility and gender nonconformity occurring across the globe.
While Trump’s election is not the sole cause of the backlash, the cultural influence of the United States, especially through social media has made it more socially acceptable to hate, ostracize, and call for the elimination of sexual and gender minorities.
“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” Davies told the British newspaper. “I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponizing hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”
He added, “I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime.”
Davies was honored with the Gaydio Icon Award at the Gaydio Pride Awards in Manchester, England, last Friday. He used his acceptance speech to criticize Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the “unofficial” head of the Department of Government Efficiency.
“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he said, taking a dig at Musk, who owns (and controls) the social media platform X. “We have never had this in the history of the world. It is terrifying because [Musk] and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”
Davies detailed how, when he left home at age 18 in 1981, the gay community began to confront the nascent HIV/AIDS epidemic that would eventually claim millions of lives. And yet, he noted, the community banded together to fight back, demanding that governments take action to curb the epidemic, lobbying for groundbreaking advances in medicine, and seeking to educate people about HIV/AIDS to allow them to protect themselves from transmission of the virus.
Davies warned that the peril the gay community is now facing is greater than it was in the 1980s.
“The threat from America, it’s like something [from] The Lord of the Rings,” he said. “It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil.”
He told The Guardian that the gay community would have to respond by doing “what we always do in times of peril,” by organizing under the radar to fight back against the erosion of LGBTQ rights and efforts to silence or erase the LGBTQ community.
“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done, which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march,” he said. “If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again, which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.”
The New York Police Department has increased its security presence at New York University after the school received multiple emails containing bomb threats, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and other bigoted messages.
On January 22, shortly after 7 a.m., NYU announced that two emails had threatened violence at separate on-campus locations. One email contained a bomb threat targeting Palladium Residence Hall, while the other "included a threat to space within the Silver Center," home to the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, reports Gay City News.
After years of playing while closeted, Jesse Kortuem says the HBO series Heated Rivalry helped him finally reconcile his identity with the sport he loves.
Jesse Kortuem, a hockey player who has competed in several adult leagues but never at the professional level, says he was inspired to come out after watching HBO's Heated Rivalry, a romance centered on closeted gay hockey players.
In a Facebook post, Kortuem recalled growing up in Minnesota as the youngest of four boys and playing hockey from a young age, while struggling to reconcile his love for the sport with his sexuality.
"To any hockey player, the sounds of the rink and the feel of cold air are unmistakable. The slapshots, the pucks hitting the boards, the skates carving fresh ice, and the high-pitched clang of a puck hitting the post bring immense comfort," Kortuem wrote. "For a long time, however, the rink did not feel like a place where I could be all of me. I felt I had to hide parts of myself for far too long."
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