In one of my latest videos on YouTube, I critiqued the final season of Stranger Things in many ways, but chief among them was making one of its main characters gay. It was a moment that felt shoehorned and forced, and it slowed the entire story to a halt to have this character come out. In the comments of the video, a gay person simply said, "As a gay guy, I fully agree."
I responded with sympathy, saying, "I feel bad for your community sometimes. It's like you're in the middle of watching a play and suddenly the director comes up on stage, stops the program, and says, 'Everyone acknowledge this person's existence.' Now everyone is looking at you kinda peeved, and damn near every play you go to, it keeps happening, and everyone just gets angrier and angrier at you.'"
The guy responded to that in a way I didn't expect.
"I'm not even in the community dawg, I just like men."
It kind of reinforced something I'd thought about the LGBTQ+ community for some time, and that's that many of this "community," especially those in the LGB part of it, don't actually associate or care about the "community." They're just people trying to live their own lives without having to tie it to any kind of political or cultural movement.
And I can respect that. For me, what you do behind your door is your business. Not mine. I don't want it to be mine. I've got my own life to live, and with all the cares and concerns that come with it to care too much about what my neighbor is doing in their free time. I think many LGB people feel the same. Almost a year ago, I wrote an article discussing that the unspoken reason many Pride events are losing support isn't just because corporations are pulling out, but also because many LGB people are also leaving.
Read: There's Another Unspoken Reason Pride Parades Are Losing Funding
The participation in community activities just isn't there anymore, and sure enough, there seems to be a rift forming between the LGB and TQ+ part of that community, and has been for some time. Gay activist groups have popped up that don't actually promote gay and lesbian agendas, but actively fight against the TQ+ agenda. Lesbians are complaining consistently about men deluded into thinking they are women going into their bars and hang-outs and demanding sexual relationships.
It's all become so muddled and intense that I don't blame many in the LGB community for saying, "You know what? We got what we wanted with the whole tolerance thing, so we're gonna go live out our lives now." And when these organizations and groups look for support, they no longer find it. The steam has gone out of the movement, and with that loss of power comes a loss of money.
According to an Instagram post from "GayDays Orlando," their annual gathering at Disney has been cancelled due to a lack of support:
After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to pause the GayDays Orlando event scheduled for June 2026. Changes to our host hotel agreement, the loss of key sponsorship support, and broader challenges currently impacting LGBTQIA+ events nationwide made it impossible to deliver the experience our community deserves. This is a pause — not an ending. For more than 30 years, GayDays has been built by and for our community. Our focus now is on reimagining the future and returning with a stronger, more sustainable event.
The post itself has only 45 comments and 328 likes. For a huge event that had corporate sponsors and associations with hotels, I find this lack of interaction interesting. For all intents and purposes, I'm still a small-time creator on Instagram, and my mid-tier posts get around that level of interaction. You would think that an organization that was powerful enough to get corporate sponsors and hotels would have a bit more in the way of outrage for canceling something that's been going on since the early '90s.
Nope. It's more or less quiet.
Obviously, I can't prove this, but I can't help but think many in the LGB community checked out. I don't think it was a withdrawal of corporate sponsors, but a lack of participation. If there were a mass of people ready to take part, I'm sure there would've been at least a handful of corpos ready to stamp their name on it and hand over some funding for the PR, but there's not.
And I can't help but think this is the best thing for the LGB people. The activist community was breeding a level of resentment and fatigue that had many of them targeted as pedophiles, rapists, weirdos, and mentally unstable when, really, they were just not a part of the mainstream definition of the community from the beginning.
I wouldn't say that normalization of homosexuality has been achieved, and I don't think it ever truly will be, but everyone outside that lifestyle didn't want to care about homosexuals, and there's clearly a large group of homosexuals that don't want you to care either. We all just want to be left alone to live our lives, and with the LGB people walking away from the greater movement, I think the greater movement will soon whither and we can all do just that.
Leave each other alone and live in peace.
