Homophobia of course never went away, but not long ago, it seemed like it might. Implicit and explicit bias against gay people fell steadily from 2007 to 2020 and was on track to soon hit zero (!), according to a 2022 study by the psychologists Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. This accorded with the ambient feeling of late-2010s culture, when Lil Nas X was the pink-hatted prince of pop and Budweiser was striping its cans in rainbow colors without fear of a bullet from Kid Rock.
But something changed in the early 2020s. Pollsters began noting diminishing approval for LGBTQ legal protections. As trans issues became inescapable in polarized national politics, explicit anti-trans bias spiked 16 percent from 2021 to 2024, according to Charlesworth, Banaji, and the researcher Meriel Doyle. Less intuitively, the trend line of long-declining homophobia reversed, resulting in a 10-point jump for explicit anti-gay bias over that same period.
The past few months in politics have made this turn obvious. Prominent right-wing voices who justified the killing of the protester Renee Good described her as a “lesbian agitator” and a “rug munching leftist,” as though her sexuality might have any bearing on whether she deserved to die.
The White House advertised car deregulation with a video that mocked two blue-haired, queer-seeming people pathetically stalled in a Prius. Commentators have taken to treating gay and its synonyms as an insult. Conservative groups launched a campaign to roll back marriage rights, with the name “Greater Than”—as in, the well-being of kids (allegedly endangered by gay parents) is more important than equality.
In the wilds of digital culture, gay panic roams in more anarchic forms. Reels and TikTok teem with jokes about Jeffrey Epstein, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and a feminized version of Charlie Kirk preying on boys—though Epstein serially exploited girls and Kirk was a straight, married conservative whom no one has accused of abuse. Nicki Minaj, that longtime queer icon turned MAGA trophy, has taken to dissing “cocksuckas” like Don Lemon. Millions of views accumulated for a kid rapping about the demonic nature of LGBTQ people. Zesty became Zoomer-speak for “fruity” or “swishy” a few years back. And in livestreams and chat rooms, the old-school slurs seem as hot as ever.
This wave is one symptom of a broader cultural regression. During the 2020s, measures of intra-group prejudices of all sorts—racism, sexism, ageism—have been rising, according to a New York Times article about the return of homophobia by Charlesworth and her Northwestern colleague Eli J. Finkel. Trans folks, long the subject of sustained conservative criticism, continue losing not only public acceptance but legal rights; Kansas, for example, just revoked driver’s licenses for people whose listed gender doesn’t match what they were assigned at birth.
But although transphobia overlaps with homophobia, Charlesworth and Finkel argue that trans backlash is not the primary reason for rising anti-gay sentiment. Instead, they suggest that one factor explains the rise in all kinds of identity-based biases: the same blend of economic anxiety and anti-establishment sentiment that’s driving so much of American politics. They write, “Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken.”
The irony is that a minority once viewed as filled with sissies and losers is now portrayed as filled with bullies and power brokers, and straight people, especially men, seem to perceive themselves as the weak and afraid ones. This inversion explains a host of baffling political and cultural phenomena of late. It also shows that some of the most durable stereotypes about gay people were never really about sexuality—which might explain why the homophobes, more and more, seem to fit those stereotypes.
Over the past few months, the young and male-dominated online subculture of “looks-maxxing” has blown up into a mainstream-media cycle . . . . Looks-maxxing is an ethos of self-improvement taken to an extreme, and its more explicit inspirations are the pickup artists of early-2000s infamy and the incels of 2010s 4Chan. The idea is that in a society that has allegedly become hostile to men—male privilege coded as toxic masculinity, and so on—the only way for boys to gain an edge is to be handsome. Methods for maximizing looks range from workouts and skin-care routines to more radical options, such as chewing hard gum for hours to get a squarer jaw.
The poster child for this world is a waifish, wavy-haired 20-year-old who goes by the name Clavicular. He says he started taking testosterone at age 14 and that he does crystal meth to attain hollow cheeks. . . . . He’s also a frequent user of sexist, homophobic, and racist slurs—usually delivered in a tone of icy boredom—and is pals with the Hitler fan Nick Fuentes and the professional misogynist Andrew Tate.
The ostensible point of looks-maxxing is to bag hot chicks, but quite clearly the real fun comes from inspiring awe in men. To the Times, Clavicular described sex with women as mostly a waste of time—something that “is going to gain me nothing.” What he really wants to do is “mog,” meaning attain status over other dudes (mog is short for AMOG or “Alpha Male of the Group”). He’s considering getting double-jaw-replacement surgery in order to look like the guy who (according to his pseudoscientific calculations) has the the most handsome face on earth: Matt Bomer, a gay actor frequently featured in work by Ryan Murphy, TV’s king of queer dramedy.
As many social-media users have suggested, all of this seems a bit, well ... y’know. Clavicular is like a blend of Dorian Gray and Patrick Bateman, those fictional creations of gay authors out to probe the sinister side of male vanity.
The psychologist Alan Downs’s The Velvet Rage deconstructed the “best little boy in the world” syndrome that makes many gay guys into overachievers. Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” crystallized a way of seeing the world as full of artifice, which can lead queer people to behave in a self-conscious, knowingly false manner. Oscar-winning movies such as Moonlight and Brokeback Mountain depicted gay men disguising their gendered shame in traditionally manly trappings. The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examined the extent to which jealous imitation drives all manner of same-sex relations, straight and gay.
Gay people realize, at some early age, that the world isn’t made for people like them. And for men, raised with the social pressure to seek dominance, that realization can lead to an obsession with climbing the rungs—whether in the context of sex, money, or something else. All of which is to say: Gay men are the original incels. They are born into heightened status anxiety and must maneuver to get ahead. And one way to do that is to be hot.
The looks-maxxers have stumbled into a similar set of psychological conditions by dint of socioeconomic circumstances and social media. The 21st century’s obstacles for young men—as seen in deaths of despair and lagging employment—have been amply publicized both by credible journalists and by charlatans such as Fuentes. Clearly, many boys are struggling with a sense of futility. In one stream, Clavicular explained that he felt “we live in one of the worst societies ever throughout the entire history of the world.” What he meant, he went on to say, is that a woman will barely look at a man unless he’s high status.
Women and girls are becoming only more fixated on their beauty. But they’ve faced the pressure of being pretty for generations. . . . . . Straight men are just catching up, vanity-wise, and political opportunists have eagerly fed into their insecurities. Fuentes, a self-declared proud virgin at age 27, recently urged his followers to spend all their energy trying to “ascend,” the looks-maxxing term for becoming your best self. Tate has said that any man who has sex with women for pleasure is “gay” because they should be focused on procreation. Men like these preach that various historically marginalized groups—gays, Jews, Blacks, women—are to blame for the cultural conditions their viewers chafe at. Self-improvement, in this view, isn’t pursued to, well, improve the self. It’s to win a competition.
Yet the link between looks-maxxing and rising anti-gay sentiment is probably even simpler than that. Straight men feel they’ve fallen in the social hierarchy. And when they look up, who do they see?
The factual basis for broader perceptions of gay prosperity is mixed. . . . . In any case, the young generation that’s now transforming American politics grew up at a time when pop culture made LGBTQ people into aspirational figures. . . . . To many adults who’d grown up in a world in which LGBTQ people were stigmatized and sidelined, this visibility felt groundbreaking. To many of the kids who were just coming online then, gay acceptance was simply a mainstream norm—and queer people were affiliated with success. In the conspiracy-minded 2020s, that success is more widely feared than admired or understood.
This conflation of anti-establishment angst and homophobic paranoia didn’t arise organically. After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, conservative activists looking to rebuild an electoral majority stoked conspiracy theories about queer people’s newfound cultural visibility. Efforts such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and the various protests against drag-queen story hour pushed back against an alleged liberal plot to “groom” or “indoctrinate” kids. And the censorious and controlling nature of those efforts offers a reminder of another comparison for the vanity of the new homophobes: fascism. A fascination with appearance, self-mastery, and masculinity has also long been the provenance of authoritarian regimes—including ones that brutalized gays, Jews, and immigrants. Mass status anxiety, history has shown time and again, can be exploited for the most dangerous kind of politics.
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