LGBTQ+ Some People Would Rather Die So They Can Hate, Than Love So They Can Live

Hatred often manifests as an absurd force—irrational, self-defeating, and strangely persistent. My earliest memories in a small, deeply rural Southern town revolve around being singled out not for what I was, but for how I sounded and what I loved. I didn’t carry the local drawl; I spoke the way my family spoke—bookish, precise—and that alone made me conspicuous. In a place where conformity was a kind of social currency, I stood out for caring about things no one around me cared about: **Kenneth Branagh performances, Shakespeare festivals, and computers**. The paradox was simple and brutal: the more curious and expressive I was, the more it marked me as “other.” I learned early that difference, even innocent difference, could be treated as a threat. When I eventually left, I assumed that chapter would stay behind. By the early 1990s, I found myself among creative communities—people drawn to theater, science, design, and technology—where individuality wasn’t punished but prized. My professional life as a technologist and creative lead placed me at the intersection of **engineering teams and design teams**. I could program, but I also had deep fluency in digital arts, and my work often meant guiding both kinds of minds at once. The culture of design, in particular, included many gay creatives whose talent, humor, and originality made them some of my favorite collaborators. Engineers brought a different kind of joy—precision, elegance, systems thinking. My circles reflected the work: artists, designers, coders, thinkers. I gravitated toward capable, interesting people without regard for identity categories, because in those environments what mattered was what you could make, not who you were. In 2010, I married a bisexual woman who was known for producing cult films within the LGBTQ film scene and had previously been in same-sex relationships. To me, this was simply part of her story, not a defining feature. I believed we were living in a time when love, acceptance, and individuality were steadily gaining ground. Over time, however, I noticed a subtle shift. My long-standing intellectual passions—science, artificial intelligence, and life-extension research—were not shared with the same enthusiasm, and other interests seemed to receive more encouragement. At first, I didn’t mind. Like many people in love, I was willing to bend, to accommodate, to prioritize harmony over my own curiosities. ### A Fracture in Progress: The Sudden Turn of Hatred In 2019, something in our home life shifted in a way I could neither predict nor stabilize. This was a person who had once moved comfortably among diverse communities, who had worked in creative spaces, who had embraced people from every background without hesitation. The change did not arrive as an argument or a disagreement. It arrived as a **different informational reality** slowly taking root. At first it was small—offhand remarks about “the gay community,” stray comments that felt out of character but easy to dismiss. I assumed stress, mood, or some passing irritation. But the pattern deepened. Nights grew longer, lit by the glow of YouTube videos from anonymous creators speaking in urgent tones about hidden agendas, secret plots, and threats lurking beneath ordinary life. The content had a common structure: blurry images, stitched clips, ominous narration, and a constant insistence that the viewer was being let in on truths the rest of the world was too blind to see. Then a word entered the house that I had barely registered before: **QAnon**. What had once been fringe internet noise became the centerpiece of daily conversation. Life-saving scientific advances, public institutions, long-respected figures—everything was reinterpreted through a lens of suspicion and paranoia. The world was no longer complicated; it was secretly orchestrated. She tried repeatedly to convince me of claims so detached from reality that I struggled to even engage them. One of her recurring assertions was that **Bill Gates—my childhood hero because of Flight Simulator and the early days of personal computing—was secretly a woman**, and that Melinda was actually a man. She showed me video after video that supposedly “proved” this. Another time she insisted that **Hillary Clinton was a robot on wheels**. These weren’t jokes or metaphors to her. They were presented as literal, undeniable facts supported by what she believed was evidence. As the weeks passed, the themes grew darker. The videos moved from suspicion to grotesque fantasy: politicians eating babies, coded symbols in everyday objects, and the belief that gay people were trafficking children through secret signals embedded in online listings. The most horrifying claim she repeated with total sincerity was that **10,000 children were being held beneath the White House, raped and eaten**. She spoke about this as if it were a documented reality the media refused to report. Watching this unfold was like watching someone step into a parallel universe governed by a different set of rules for truth. Facts no longer mattered. Plausibility no longer mattered. The emotional intensity of the narrative was all that mattered. Attempts to reason, to slow down, to ask for sources or coherence, only reinforced in her mind that I “didn’t understand what was really happening.” What made it unbearable was the contrast with who she had been. This was someone who had lived among artists, filmmakers, designers, and technologists—someone who had once celebrated individuality. Now the atmosphere in our home was saturated with hostility toward the very kinds of people and ideas that had once filled our lives with energy and curiosity. Homophobic rhetoric mixed with anti-science suspicion until conversation itself felt fragile. I had spent years working with diverse communities, including projects connected with the **United Nations**, advocating for inclusion, building environments where different kinds of people could collaborate. And yet inside my own home I was witnessing a total collapse of that shared language. The person I loved was being pulled deeper into a world where hate was the organizing principle and disinformation was treated as revelation. The hardest part to admit is this: **I could not save her**. No amount of patience, evidence, humor, or calm discussion could bridge the gap between the reality we once shared and the one she had entered. It was not an argument I lost. It was a reality I could no longer reach. #### When Hatred Becomes an Identity and the Feed Becomes Its Habitat One of the hardest realizations of the last decade is that some people do not merely *hold* anger; they organize their identity around it. The modern digital environment has made this easier than at any other point in history. Social platforms, optimized for engagement rather than coherence, have become polarized information arenas where small, highly motivated factions can use anonymity, aesthetics, and algorithmic drift to amplify racial and cultural hostility far beyond their actual numbers. What I repeatedly encounter online is not representative of ordinary conservatives, Republicans, or even most MAGA voters I know in real life. It is a narrower, more radical subculture that borrows patriotic symbols and populist language as camouflage while trafficking in coded ethnonationalism. Their profiles often look mundane at first glance—flags, family photos, military imagery, Americana—but a short scroll reveals a different layer beneath the surface: anti-immigrant agitation, demographic panic, and racial grievance presented as “common sense.” The civility is a veneer; the payload sits just below it. These are rarely lone voices. They appear as **interlinked clusters** of accounts that follow, amplify, and validate one another in tight loops. Engage with one and you are quickly exposed to many more. The effect is subtle but cumulative: timelines begin to shift, content recommendations change, and what once felt like a broad civic conversation starts to feel like a tunnel lined with increasingly hostile rhetoric. The mechanism is not mysterious; it is the predictable outcome of algorithms rewarding repetition, emotional intensity, and network density. This is not how healthy political disagreement looks. It is closer to a **self-reinforcing disinformation pipeline**—one that thrives on outrage, obscures nuance, and normalizes dehumanizing language through constant exposure. What makes it particularly corrosive is that it disguises itself as patriotism and moral clarity while steadily eroding both. Thoughtful conservatives and principled libertarians—people who care about constitutional order, civil society, and national resilience—are often drowned out by this louder, more theatrical current. I approach this as someone who does not fit neatly into partisan lanes. I am, by temperament, data-driven and skeptical of ideological packaging from any direction. I have long held views that overlap with both liberal and conservative traditions, depending on the issue, because reality is rarely tidy. My concern is not with legitimate policy disagreement; it is with the way digitally amplified extremism distorts perception and fractures the possibility of good-faith dialogue across those differences. What is especially striking is the contradiction at the heart of this subculture. Many of the people circulating this rhetoric depend, often unknowingly, on the work of the very communities they vilify. The medical advances they rely on, the technologies they use daily, the research that extends and improves their lives—these are the products of diverse teams of scientists, engineers, designers, immigrants, and yes, many LGBTQ creatives and researchers. They benefit from a future they rhetorically reject. This fringe current does not define conservatism, nor does it represent the millions of ordinary people whose views are shaped by faith, tradition, or legitimate concerns about governance. But it is loud, networked, and algorithmically advantaged. Recognizing the difference between **principled disagreement** and **weaponized resentment** has become essential for navigating today’s digital public square without being quietly pulled into its more corrosive currents. ### The Ironic Twist: Depending on the Future While Resenting the People Building It By 2024, a darker irony had come into focus for me. The people most vocal in their hostility toward LGBTQ individuals are often the same people most eager for the promises of longevity science, advanced medicine, and technological progress—without realizing how plural and interwoven the research ecosystems behind those promises actually are. For years I had followed genomics, aging research, and life-extension science with almost athletic discipline. I changed my diet, lost 150 pounds over five years, invested heavily in supplements, and tracked the frontier of gene therapy and regenerative medicine with anticipation. What gradually struck me was not a moral contradiction but a **structural one**: the future of medicine is built inside **international, interdisciplinary, and deeply diverse networks of people** whose backgrounds span every orientation, culture, and worldview imaginable. The laboratories, institutes, journals, data networks, and translational pipelines advancing our understanding of genetics, aging, and biotechnology are not monocultures. They are mosaics. Places like **Google Research** and **Google Labs** sit alongside biomedical powerhouses such as **Howard Hughes Medical Institute**, **Johns Hopkins University**, and the publishing and knowledge infrastructures of **Elsevier** and **Springer Nature**. Across Europe, the work continues through **Max Planck Society**—including institutes focused specifically on the biology of aging—through the **Leibniz Institute on Aging**, **Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology**, and at **ETH Zurich**. Open-science platforms like **PLOS** and philanthropic engines such as the **Wellcome Trust** function as connective tissue for this work. The physical science and data backbone of this civilization-scale research flows through places like **European Molecular Biology Laboratory** in Hamburg, **CERN**, and the continental research networking fabric of **GÉANT** and **eduGAIN**. Industry translation moves through groups like **Johnson & Johnson MedTech**, while knowledge philanthropy and neuroscience ecosystems are supported by **Allen Institute** and the **Paul G. Allen Foundation**. Layered beneath all of this is the **open education movement** that ensures this knowledge is not locked away but diffused into the global mind. None of these places function because of ideological uniformity. They function because of **cognitive diversity**. The irony is that the people speaking most harshly about exclusion are often dependent on ecosystems that work precisely because they are inclusive. ### Cause and Effect Without Moral Theater I don’t see this as a moral drama anymore. I see it as systems theory. When dehumanizing language becomes normalized, it doesn’t just harm people; it erodes the collaborative fabric required for large-scale scientific progress. When suspicion replaces trust, institutions that keep us alive longer become politicized and misunderstood. Old scriptural phrases about “living by the sword” read to me now as observations about feedback loops. Societies that cultivate hostility eventually degrade their own capacity for cooperation and innovation. The damage is subtle and cumulative: frayed trust, fractured discourse, weakened scientific literacy. ### The Quiet Work of Keeping the Commons Healthy This is why advocacy and educational groups matter—not as symbols, but as maintainers of the social conditions that allow talent to remain in the system. Organizations such as **Stonewall**, **Pride in STEM**, **GLAAD**, **LGBTQ+ STEM**, and university diversity groups like those at **University of Liverpool** and **University of East Anglia** help ensure that brilliant people are not pushed out of the very pipelines humanity depends on. Even efforts like the **Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development** intersect here, because mental health, inclusion, and scientific participation are not separate problems—they are part of the same human infrastructure. ### A World Where No One Has to Brace Themselves What I ultimately hope for is simple: a world where people don’t feel they must brace themselves just for being who they are. Where curiosity is not treated as deviance. Where collaboration is understood as strength. ### Conclusion: Progress Is a Collective Act The future does not belong to any tribe. It belongs to those willing to participate in the shared project of human advancement. Diversity in this sense is not a slogan; it is a functional requirement for solving complex problems at scale. We can nurture that environment, or we can let resentment erode it. One path expands possibility; the other constricts it. --- ## References, Organizations, and Further Reading The themes discussed here intersect with education, mental health, media literacy, and the protection of human potential across diverse communities. The following institutions and resources operate in those domains and help sustain the social and scientific commons that innovation depends upon. ### Institutional and Educational Frameworks * **UNESCO** — *Education for Sustainable Development* initiatives linking education, social cohesion, and long-term human flourishing. * **The Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development** — Research connecting mental health, inclusion, and societal resilience. * **Howard Hughes Medical Institute** — Support for foundational research in genetics, biology, and longevity science across diverse scientific communities. ### Advocacy and Support Organizations * **The Trevor Project** — Crisis intervention and suicide prevention services for LGBTQ youth. * **Human Rights Campaign** — Advocacy for equality, civil rights, and inclusive policy. * **GLAAD** — Media advocacy focused on fair and accurate representation. * **PFLAG** — Education and support for families and allies. * **It Gets Better Project** — Storytelling and community-building for LGBTQ youth and allies. ### Research on Disinformation, Media, and Mental Health * Work from **Stanford University** examining the rise of digital disinformation and its societal effects. * Publications from the **American Psychological Association** on the mental-health impacts of hate speech and social hostility. * Analysis by the **Pew Research Center** on how social platforms amplify polarizing and harmful content. ### Literature Exploring Identity, Justice, and Human Connection * **The Hate U Give** by Angie Thomas — A narrative exploration of race, justice, and voice. * **The Anthropocene Reviewed** by John Green — Reflections on humanity, connection, and meaning in a complex world. * **The Alchemist** by Paulo Coelho — A meditation on purpose, resilience, and following one’s path. These references collectively illuminate the educational, psychological, scientific, and cultural dimensions that underpin a society capable of both innovation and compassion.