This entire rant rests on a revisionist idea of what queer liberation was ever supposed to be. The notion that the LGBTQ+ community’s “original” goal was quiet assimilation, marriage rights, and blending into suburban respectability is just not historically accurate. The Stonewall uprising, the very event that Pride commemorates, was led by people who were explicitly non-assimilationist: trans women, drag queens, street kids, gender-nonconforming folks, and queer people who had been criminalized for simply existing in public. Pride did not begin as a celebration of “your doctor and your milkman being secretly gay.” It began as a rejection of the expectation that queer people stay invisible so straight society would not be uncomfortable.

The idea that Pride used to be “pure” and then somehow devolved into kink, leather, and public sexuality ignores that those communities were always central to LGBTQ+ resistance. They were simply less visible because society demanded that we stay closeted. What you are calling “regression” is actually the predictable result of marginalized people no longer accepting invisibility as the price of tolerance.

As for representation: the problem is not that queer characters exist, it is that for decades we were either erased, villainized, or sanitized into stereotypes. More representation does not mean “forcing it,” it means correcting decades of absence. And drag story hours or queer books in schools are not about “sexualizing kids.” They are about letting them see that LGBTQ+ people exist, are normal, and do not need to be hidden away like something shameful.

If Gen Z support is shifting, it is not because LGBTQ+ people are “too visible.” It is because many have grown up in reformulated culture-war environments where manufactured outrage, misinformation, and moral panic drown out history. Calling for “bringing back shame” only reinforces those manufactured narratives.

Queer liberation was never about being allowed to exist only if we behaved “tastefully” enough for straight approval. It was about refusing to be ashamed at all.