OK, spill: who has been adding gay pills to the water supply? Someone must have been, because the number of LGBTQ-identifying adults in the US has jumped dramatically. According to a recent Gallup poll, the numbers have gone from 3.5% in 2012 to 7.1% in 2021. Gen Z, defined by Gallup as people born between 1997 and 2003, is leading the charge: 20.8% of them identified as LGBTQ+ in 2021, up from 10.5% in 2017.
People take things very seriously these days, so I should probably state for the record that I am obviously joking about the whole gay pills in the water thing. As a card-carrying member of the International Society for the Advancement of Homosexual Lifestyles (ISAHL), I can assure you that the Gay Agenda explicitly prohibits the use of bioweapons. No, we focus solely on mind control techniques. A little bit of brainwashing, subliminal messaging during the ad breaks, that sort of thing.
I can’t divulge the details of any of ISAHL’s top-secret techniques, I’m afraid. But I will say this: it warms the cockles of my homosexual heart to see such a big increase in young people feeling comfortable being themselves. I came out 20 years ago when “gay” was still an acceptable insult, you could count the number of out celebrities on one hand and if you saw an LGBTQ+ character on TV there was a 99% chance they were a psychopath or a predator. The first time I worked up the courage to kiss the woman I was dating in public, a stranger tried to hit me in the face.
I came out relatively early in life but, thanks to the stigma that was still attached to being gay, it took me a long time to be proud. Things are far from perfect now, of course, particularly for trans people, but we’ve made a hell of a lot of progress. A reactionary faction may be trying to drag us back to the bad old days, but the kids are all right.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
