It's not just stupid, banal shit like "
haha that's so gay" or whatever people were railing against in the 2000s, but stuff like relentless violent bullying, being thrown out by parents, etc. (as opposed to trans identified teens who run away from "transphobic" but loving parents in AliExpress sailor uniforms and pink wigs) that fucked a lot of Millennial (and older) gays/lesbians over in this department. While I agree overemphasizing the importance of dating/fucking in high school is stupid as hell, for gay/lesbian kids, particularly the time period Millennials grew up in compared to now, the issue was moreso not being able to sexually develop normally at the same rate as their straight peers. Of course, it's an issue
zoomers don't really face because of how different the climate has become (now it's all about being a weird xenogender on twitter).
Consider the gap between a straight boy being able to bond with peers over attraction to girl versus a gay boy being seen as weird, creepy, a pervert, etc. if he expresses attraction to men to male peers. Even just coming out can be seen as coming onto the other person, and I've had gay male friends share the frustration of coming out to a same sex friend only to have the friend be like "Wait, you're not into me, right?" Consider being closeted until you reach 18 or so and go to college, and only just then being able to even openly address your sexuality. Sure, straight people absolutely can end up not being able to have sex until college or later, but they usually aren't pressured directly or indirectly (by their own fear, by family, by friends, by their church, etc.) to hide being straight itself. Consider that it was pretty common at some point for gay people to suddenly come out in their 40s or so, after having families and straight relationships, and that there really isn't an equivalent to this for straight people. It was heavily stigmatized to be gay, and to some extent still is.
Plus, especially 10-15 years ago, there just wasn't really a model for how gay relationships worked. Straight kids have over a decade of media and socialization teaching them how straight relationships work by the time they hit high school, and most have the typical dad/mom relationship to learn from as well. For gay teens in the 2000s-2010s, what was there really? Most of us didn't have gay role models we grew up with or could aspire to. And then to cap it off, trans stuff started taking off in the 2010s and ballooned after gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. (2015), meaning whatever focus had briefly shifted to gays and lesbians in media swung pretty hard towards trans stuff by the late 2010s (as we are seeing now in the early 2020s). Take the L Word, what was
the quintessential lesbian media back then;
they cast two males (mtfs) as "cis" lesbians. Even gay media is being retconned to be trans inclusive. Imagine how fucked actual gay and lesbian kids are growing up in a world where being gay/lesbian is mostly acceptable (if at least only on its face) but they are also being force-fed trans rhetoric and propaganda pushing the idea that mtfs and ftms are totally just like the real thing, and they're bigoted and transphobic for feeling otherwise. Lesbians growing up thinking they're defective for not being able to learn to "get over" their male partners' dicks, gay men being harassed into fucking "boipussy". It wasn't great before but it was getting better until this started happening.
Anyways, back to the original point. I know it sounds petty and whiny, but consider how far-reaching this stuff is. It's not just dating, but learning
how to date (and consider having a dating pool that's like,
3.5% of the population
at most, and likely far less once you factor in whatever you're into, be it 6'4" chads or blonde hair or doesn't smoke or whatever. For gay men I imagine the number is reduced even more if you're looking for a long term relationship, from what I've heard from gay male friends). It's not just getting married, but learning how to navigate same-sex marriage (and until 2015, it wasn't even an option in most of the U.S.) when you've likely never known someone who was in one in your entire life growing up. It's not just parenting, but navigating being a gay parent, which is difficult since most parenting guides are understandably focused on straight couples (not even getting into the way people perceive gay adoption, as if it's going to totally damage the kid versus the oh so gentle and noble foster care system).
Basically the point isn't "boohoo I didn't have sex until my 20s" but that sexual development isn't just having sex for the first time or dating or whatever. It's learning how to date, how to have sex, who you are as a sexual person, and so on, something that is modeled for straight kids from birth but which wasn't really available to gay or lesbian teens in the 2000s.
FWIW a lot of us
did figure out how to date, so it's not debilitating by any means nor is it an excuse for immature or shitty behavior. But learning was a process that was largely alone, in a society that did not really cater to people like us in the slightest (I don't know how to word this or express this, but an easy example is just, I dunno, maybe the next time you take a walk or whatever in a shopping district look at the ads with couples in them. They're almost always straight. It's a pretty decent reflection of how far we are now when ads that
do have gay people in them get
news articles written about the mere fact that
they feature gay couples lol).
)
