It's Remarkable How Unremarkable Gay Pride Has Become

I didn’t meet a (non-closeted) gay person for the first 20 years of my life. This isn’t surprising. Growing up in Central Indiana, being called gay was just about the worst thing that could happen to anyone. I remember being called the f word and having it sting so much that I couldn’t sleep at night.

And yet the most remarkable thing about the Gay Pride celebrations nationwide yesterday is that they have been utterly unremarkable. Gay rights have become normal. Maybe more than normal: cool. Every notable corporation and politician, especially in big city politics, wants to be seen walking the parade. Indeed, the only notable controversy from Pride appears to be the exclusion of the NYPD from that city’s parade.

Some members of the NYPD, which was first barred from Pride after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, described the Pride parade’s decision as a form of “bigotry.”

While the parade organizers claim the decision was made due to the officers’ refusal to march without guns, the NYPD didn’t buy this explanation. Gay officers were so angry that they organized a protest of Pride that attracted NY’s most prominent political leaders, from Gov. Kathy Hochul to the likely future mayor Zohran Mamdani.

A few decades ago, politicians lined up to on the streets to condemn gay people as a threat. Today, they line up to celebrate gay people and beg for their support. It’s a pretty dramatic change.

There’s a lot that could be written about that transformation in society. (I’ve written about it quite a bit myself.) But the central point I want to make here is simply that social change happens much more quickly than most people think. There are some types of systems that move slowly and incrementally. The movement of glaciers. The steady progress of economic growth. The changes to the American diet.

But social systems are very different. Human beings, and the systems we create, have evolved to operate by feedback loops. One person’s change feeds into another’s. This means that change can quickly cascade, like a snowball building up into an avalanche. To predict what change is going to happen, in contexts like these, it’s less important to see how much things have changed in the past and more important to see what engines for change might appear in the future.

That is one of the primary reasons I am very confident that transformative change is on the horizon for animals. The engines are ready to propel us forward! I’ll explain why this is the case in a future blog. But, for now, let’s just celebrate the engines of the past. If the animal rights movement can create 1/10th the same power, then (within one generation) the world for animals will be completely transformed.