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.”
Younger teenagers -- primarily girls -- are less likely to identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual than they were a few years ago, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
The data, drawn from the CDC's biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, show that the biggest decline in LGB identification among high school students is among ninth-grade girls, according to Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.
Writing in her Substack Generation Tech, Twenge noted that the 2025 survey data show a decline in LGB identification across all high school grades, with the starkest decline among ninth graders -- from nearly 17% in 2021 and 2023 before cratering to 11% in 2025.
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