In early June, Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican firebrand from Tennessee, did something he often does: Post a message on X that was sure to shock. “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.”
But unlike some of his other recent virulent posts — for example, about Muslim Americans — this one drew condemnation from many members of his own party, including Mike Johnson, the House speaker.
The post’s brief life spoke to the divisions within the Republican Party on same-sex marriage. Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision protecting gay marriage, turns 11 this year, and there is little indication that establishment Republicans are questioning it. At the same time, Christian conservatives, like Mr. Ogles, now a crucial part of Mr. Trump’s coalition, are pursuing that goal with renewed energy and ambition, often using the push for trans rights as a new front in the debate.
Support for gay marriage is now declining, reversing a yearslong trend. Earlier this month, Gallup released a poll showing that Republican support for gay marriage now stood at 37 percent, a decline of 18 percentage points from a high in 2022. Support among independents declined, too.
And a few Republican lawmakers are also pushing resolutions against gay marriage. . . . . Republican states have even started to rebrand Pride Month, the June commemoration of the Stonewall uprising and the signature moment for the gay liberation movement, calling it Fidelity Month or Nuclear Family Month.
Despite the arguments being made by Christian conservatives, and the findings of the Gallup polling, Gavin Smith, a gay Republican town councilman in Lexington, S.C., said he has not seen any evidence of rising opposition to gay couples among voters.
Like Mr. Smith, the husband and I have not experienced any hostility among yacht club and country club members we interact with and from Republican clients. Yet, the growing attacks from evangelicals and their political prostitutes within the GOP remain unnerving and can undermine one's sense of safety and security. Meanwhile and in direct contradiction to the movement within the GOP, as noted at the outset of this post, gay themed literature and films are seemingly surging and being embraced. One of David Beckham's sons is making his acting debut in a gay romance film and Amazon will be releasing a sequel to "Red White and Royal Blue" - one of Amazon's top streaming films - as filming prepares to start for season two of "Heated Rivalry" which seemingly has a cult following among straight women. A second piece in the New York Times looks at this surge in acceptance:
Just over 10 years ago, I opened a small bookstore a few hours northwest of New York City. The shelves are arranged by affinity: Notable people choose their 10 favorite books; elsewhere, titles gather around more whimsical themes. Early this year, I found myself creating a shelf I could not have imagined when I started: queer sports romances.
That’s where you now find “Heated Rivalry” beside “Thirty Love” and “Futbolista” — closeted hockey players, closeted tennis players, closeted college soccer players. The covers promise muscle, yearning and secrecy. Though the protagonists tend to be men, many of the genre’s writers and readers are women. At first, I saw these books as a playful little subgenre, a narrow tributary of romance publishing. Lately, I’ve come to see them as evidence of a much larger shift: Queer literature has become one of the growth engines of the publishing industry.
L.G.B.T.Q. fiction has never been more visible, more varied or better promoted. . . . It is not a stretch to call the past few years the richest period for queer fiction since 1978, when Andrew Holleran published “Dancer From the Dance,” Larry Kramer published “Faggots” and Edmund White published “Nocturnes for the King of Naples.” That post-Stonewall flowering was followed by AIDS, which robbed queer literature of many of its writers and a substantial portion of its audience. Publishers retreated. To be labeled a gay or queer writer was a constraint.
The old assumption was that queerness should be downplayed to get a wider readership. In 2007, when Rakesh Satyal’s “Blue Boy,” a gay Indian American coming-of-age novel, was being shopped around, he thought its intersection of South Asian and queer experience might broaden its appeal. Publishers saw the opposite. “It was seen as a reduction of the audience,” he told me.
Today, the opposite looks true. Queerness sells. . . . . This is not simply a story of representation getting its due. The audience for literary fiction has long skewed toward women and gay men. What has changed is the industry’s willingness to acknowledge that and the many straight women who are willing to read about gay characters.
According to data compiled from BookScan, sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction (excluding digital sales) were roughly $8 million in 2015, the year Hanya Yanagihara published “A Little Life,” heralded by Garth Greenwell as a great gay novel. By 2025, annual sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction had reached more than $80 million, a tenfold increase over a decade in which fiction more broadly has struggled.
The very qualities that once made queer fiction seem too risky now make it useful. Queer books also come with organic systems of circulation: book clubs, queer bookstores, online fan communities and events that double as gatherings of friends. . . . For publishers, that is increasingly valuable. Queer books don’t simply find individual readers; they find communities.
The boom has created incentives for publishers to package gayness and for straight writers to borrow it. AndrĂ© Aciman, who is not gay, wrote one of the defining gay love stories of the past 20 years in “Call Me by Your Name.”
“I am writing outside my own experience to an extent,” he said, “but I’ve experienced desire, and I understand desire, and I can understand the desire between these two people on a human level. I hope that it felt true because it felt true when I was writing it, and I think that’s the important thing.”
One can only hope that the explosion of gay literature and movies/series will help usher in a renewed acceptance of LGBT people and demonstrate that our lives and loves are legitimate and have true value.
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