There Might Already be More Hope Than You Believe

By Robert Tarokh

I was on a call with a friend from home last week discussing the news regarding the removal of the Pulse Nightclub shooting memorial and a theme that I’ve heard more and more commonly as of late came up: a lack of hope for the future of our community. Between the increasingly anti-trans rhetoric of politicians across the political spectrum and the ever growing threat that the Supreme Court might rule against the precedent set by Obergefell case, this isn’t at all an unreasonable thing to feel. To many, it seems that our society is regressing on nearly every front that we’ve made so much progress on throughout the 2000’s and 2010’s. In spite of these setbacks, I’d like to make the argument that the best answer to this current time is to remain hopeful for the future and to not give up on America so quickly.

I’m sure that simply stating this isn’t going to convince you of anything, so I’d like to develop these lines of thought. One of the more recent points of doom that has pervaded throughout the media is that the acceptance of LGBTQ+ marriage and non-heterosexual lifestyles has fallen in the past year. This is in fact true, as a recent GLAAD survey report showed that the percentage of the American population that accepts the LGBTQ+ community has fallen from 84% to 80% from 2023 to 2024. However, there are several things about this data point that are worth noting, the first being that support for the LGBTQ+ community has ebbed and flowed over the past two decades on a year by year basis and that it’s incredibly difficult to draw an overall conclusion based on one year of data. The second major point to note is that supermajorities of the American population support the LGBTQ+ community’s right to “have the freedom to live their lives and not be discriminated against” (89% in favor) and would support members of their family that came out as transgender or nonbinary (77% in favor). Even if people vote against this on a policy basis, a majority of the public is against making regressive changes to the status quo and ultimately supports us in our right to pursue happiness. Finally, the American public is ultimately in a more conservative mood at this moment and as such, we’d likely expect support for our community to ebb somewhat. The fact that the percentage change in support has ultimately been relatively minor shows that there’s a large portion of the public in which pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes are sticking and that overall support for anti-LGBTQ legislation is likely to have a firm ceiling.

The other major argument that’s being made right now refers to the barrage of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that has hit state legislatures in the last two years and the potential threats to the precedent set by Obergefell. It’s near impossible to argue that the precedents that are being set by anti-LGBTQ+ legislators will not adversely impact millions of LGBTQ+ Americans and as such, I’d like to make an appeal to our collective resilience as a community and the long arc of the moral universe as spoken of by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While our community will, and has already, suffered under the rule of Anti-LGBTQ+ politicians, this is not the first nor last time that such has occurred. Our community is made up of elders who lived their lives afraid to simply be themselves due to the puritanical attitudes of their early days, and almost all of us have personally experienced discrimination for our gender identity or sexuality at least one point or another. The elders of our community lived to see the callousness of the government response to AIDS, but have also lived through the greatest period of acceptance that has occurred in the last two millennia.

As a community, we are familiar to having to endure horrible circumstances and they alone will not be capable of annihilating us and while we may suffer, we will not be erased or silenced by those who seek to create a culture of fear and as they have in the past, things will ultimately get better if we all devote ourselves to improving them.

Now these statements are fine on their own, but what exactly are we to do as things get actively worse for our community? The argument that I’m making isn’t to assume that everything will simply be fine and dandy and that the proverbial forces of good will inevitably defeat evil. At the end of the day, our rights were gained through acts of resistance and we must inevitably continue to resist through fighting for elected officials that will make fighting for our rights a centerpiece of their campaign. The only way that things will ultimately get better is if we endeavor to clash with the forces of bigotry and hatred. However, our community has survived active persecution for more than a millennia, and we certainly aren’t going to just give up and go away now.

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About the Author

Robert Tarokh is a youth LGBTQ+ organizer and college student currently based in Washington D.C. He is studying political science and finance at the George Washington University and serves as the Chair of the Stonewall Caucus of the College Democrats of America and as the Vice Chair of Colleges at the LGBTQ+ Caucus of the Young Democrats of America. In his free time, he enjoys hiking, cooking, and exploring all that our capital has to offer!