We tend to overestimate the importance of the identity of the president vs. the vast power of the culture as a whole. As recently as 1988, 57 percent of Americans thought homosexual acts should be illegal. Today support for gay marriage is at 67 percent (both according to Gallup polling).

The idea that locking people up for their homosexuality was hugely popular as recently as my senior year in college seems to me so utterly bizarre that it still throws me for a loop. But a country can change internally without really looking that different on the surface. The increase in tolerance for our gay brothers and sisters, like the similar, slightly earlier shift in attitudes toward interracial relationships, is a wonderful development in our country and an example of how things we don’t much think about keep getting better.

For gay Americans, the outlook continues to improve even in parts of the country that were previously less welcoming than the cities on the coasts. We learn this from no less an authority than a self-described “queer, transgender woman who has spent most of her life in red states,” a Daily Beast reporter named Samantha Allen covering LGBT issues. Allen, in a New York Times op-ed, makes reference to the (ridiculous, unnecessary) panic on the left that followed the election of President Trump and notes that those fears have proved unfounded. From the piece:

On my road trip through what is ostensibly Trump country, I met many L.G.B.T. people who saw no need to flee their conservative home states for the coastal safe havens of generations past, thanks to local progress.
In Utah, I made arts and crafts with transgender and gender-nonconforming teenagers, most of whom belong to Mormon families. Over coffee in the Rio Grande Valley, a nonbinary friend told me that the region’s L.G.B.T. people remain as hardy as the prickly pear cactuses of South Texas. And in an Indiana town where everyone knows everyone, a transgender woman in her 50s told me how much things have changed in her area since she first came out over the course of the 2000s.
“It’s so much better,” she said. “It’s so much freer. It needs to be reported.”

Allen adds that “queer people, simply put, are everywhere” and that Americans who know them are increasingly comfortable with them. The often-repeated suggestion that people who opposed the Trump Administration should pack their bags and head for Toronto turned out to be pure paranoia.