I used to love looking after children. I found it fun to invent games and run around (and still do), and that made me a really good babysitter. I was once, unprompted, paid a $50 tip at a family event (this was before inflation) and offered a babysitting gig on the spot.

I liked looking after the kids. At one point, being a parent was all I wanted. It was something I dreamed about, part of my life plan whenever I talked about the future.

However, that dream slowly got displaced by a deep discomfort with being around children. While I liked the idea of childrearing, over and over again, I was presented with the idea that queer people like me were inherent pedophiles. "They're giving kids porn and telling third graders that they should masturbate," Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik lied in a now infamous interview with Taylor Lorenz. "They're giving middle school children guides to gay sex, anal sex, sex toys."

The message I hear — the one I unwittingly internalize — from false statements like this one is that queers are dangerous around kids and, even more than that, that we are unfit to be parents. As anti-LGBTQ politician Rick Santorum remarked in a Pew Research Center interview in 2008 about same-sex child rearing:

"What society should be about is encouraging what's best for children. What's best for children, we know, is a mother and a father who are the parents of that child, raising that child in a stable, married relationship, and we should have laws that encourage that, that support that."

This sentiment from anti-LGBTQIA advocates has ruined my comfort around children, and I wanted to talk about this meme's deep, unsettling roots and how it affects the queer community's psyche today.

A history of being called groomers

Conservatives (and I mean this more broadly than just Democrats or Republicans) didn't just start calling us "groomers" (i.e., accusing queer people of training children to be susceptible to sexual exploitation) when Chaya Raichik came onto the scene. It's an old meme that we see pop up time and time again. I always think of the infamous 1961 "educational" film Boys Beware by Sid Davis Productions, made to be shown in schools, which depicts homosexuality as a sickness where adult men prey on kids. In the words of the film's upbeat narrator, describing the Groomer character Ralph:

"Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox but no less dangerous and contagious: a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual. A person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex."

The story goes on to depict Ralph grooming a young boy to provide favors (it's implied they are sexual) in exchange for money, gifts, and attention. That film repeats the same stereotypes as modern-day conservatives such as Chaya Raichik, and it was delivered over half a century earlier.

As we can see, this has been going on for a long time. Academic Michael Bronski wrote in the Boston Review that this may be part of a larger moralist trend within Christian theology. As he argues in that piece:

"Gays are in good company, not that it is much comfort: Christians have a long history of accusing religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities of abusing, molesting, and killing children. In medieval Europe, Jews were frequently accused of ritually killing Christian children — the blood libel — often to use their blood to make matzah. Fictitious victims…were even canonized as saints to drum up fervor for pogroms. The accusation that queer people are "grooming" children to be gay or question their gender is just the modern equivalent of the blood libel: the molestation libel."

And so, from this perspective, it's best not to think of this anti-LGBT+ moral panic as something unique to queerness but one linked to religious backlashes overall — moral panics that reemerge from time to time, albeit with sometimes different political targets (see the D&D scare, the daycare hysteria, etc.).

Even if you accept that premise, we can see that an anti-queer sentiment has been building for over a century. James Kirchick argues in his piece for New York Magazine that the conspiracy theory of queer people trying to indoctrinate and subvert not just children but entire governments can be traced back to several high-profile cases in the early 1900s. This era was when homosexuality started to be classified as not just an act people did but a prescribed identity (see Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality).

He initially cites the early 1900s "Eulenburg Affair," where Prince Philipp Eulenburg, the advisor and friend of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, had their alleged correspondences revealed to the public via the press by muckraking journalist Maximilian Harden. The press spun up a narrative allegedly showing that the "pacifist" tendencies of the Kaiser were the result of this gay clique. As Kirchick writes:

"Homosexuals were confederates in what one Swiss journalist termed 'a new Freemasonry' transcending national borders, covert enemies of the state who advocated cosmopolitanism and diplomacy over nationalism and martial virtue."

We can see here a direct link between the conspiratorial thinking of then and today. The gays here, like the Jewish people in similar conspiracy theories, are seen as a plot undermining the German state. Homosexuality was not only linked with deviancy but was potentially treasonous. Kirchick would go on to describe several more political scandals in his essay, including the outing of Massachusetts Senator David Walsh for attending an all-male brothel salaciously alleged to have nazi spies.

Meanwhile, in the background in America, but very much connected to how the public would come to view homosexuality, the academic Michael Bronski describes a wave of "sex crimes" in the 1930s. These were vastly exaggerated by conservative politicians, who used the moment to scapegoat sexual deviants, which queer people were considered to be. This fearmongering led to the passage of "sexual psychopath laws" under the pretext of protecting women and children. These laws committed suspected offenders indefinitely to mental institutions, and queerness was often linked to this trend. As Bronski argues in that Boston Review piece:

"…in practice, sexual psychopath laws were often used, particularly postwar, against homosexual men who were engaged in consensual same-sex activity, even as they were continually portrayed as preying on young boys."

Over time, that pathologization of homosexuality linked queerness in many conservatives' minds to degeneracy and pedophilia. To the point that, in the 1970s, Anita Bryant infamously campaigned against a queer-friendly law in Florida under the conservative Save Our Children coalition. She pushed the insidious conspiracy theory that LGBTQIA+ people cannot reproduce, so they must "recruit" — in essence, the modern-day grooming narrative.

As you can see, anti-queer people have been calling us pedophiles forever. There have been decades of this meme that "queer people preying upon kids," and, as we shall soon see, it affects how queer people see themselves.

How it f@cks with your head

To this day, I cannot walk past a playground without feeling dirty. I push past them quickly and keep my interactions to a minimum because I am worried that others will perceive me as a monster for merely being in the same space as kids. That causes me to look at children and see them as people you cannot interact with and cannot parent.

Where did this disgust come from?

In no small part due to the history we have already cited, the mental health of the queer community is not great. It's well-documented at this point that LGBT people, particularly trans and nonbinary youth, have experienced, during this latest moral panic, an increase in suicidal ideation, as well as mental health issues such as substance use and depression.

Likewise, childrearing and queer identity are a dicey intersection. Studies have routinely reported a stigma among queer parents, which can affect their mental health. In the words of authors Rachel H. Farr and Cassandra P. Vázquez in their article for the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology: "Stigma felt by parents about their family composition may in turn negatively affect their mental health as well as perceived competence in parenting through internalized homophobia."

And so, if queer parents are already reporting a disproportionate amount of stigma, both externalized and internalized, that comes with having a "non-normal" family structure, it should surprise no one that many opt out of that process entirely. According to the census, same-sex households are much less likely than opposite-sex households to have children. When we look at user information from places like Reddit, stigma is often cited. "I don't want kids either genetically or adopted," goes one Reddit commenter. "It's just too much work, and LGBT parents face more discrimination even still in the 2020s than their straight counterparts."

Reddit has many subreddits devoted to this topic — a treasure trove of good qualitative information. Some of the reasons the commenters give for not wanting children are bureaucratic and financial. It's still not exactly easy to engage in surrogacy or adoption, even today, and the costs for such procedures and applications can get pricey pretty quickly. With the exception of cis gay men, LGBTQIA+ people are poorer on average than straight, cisgendered people, so it makes sense that financial barriers would be a significant factor.

There is also the political reason of not wanting to participate in normative life scripts. "There isn't the same societal pressure on gays to have children as there are straight people," one user declares, "…I know way too many straight people who've had children just because 'it's what you do.'"

Yet buried amongst these points is a deep discomfort around kids. "I despise children," goes one user, "and I am glad that I'll never have to worry about having one accidentally." Another writes: "I hate children, so gay or straight, I wouldn't want one either way." "I am wildly uncomfortable and annoyed around children," declares one user, "I never know what to say to them, and they give me anxiety."

There is this tension over queer identity as it relates to children, and I believe a part (though certainly not all of it) relates to this internalized anti-queerness. We are told over and over again that we are a danger to children, and for some, that pushes them to maintain their distance. As one Redditor commented on why some gay men avoid having kids: "Some are scared of the old stigma [where] some people have this insane mindset that they believe gays are Paedophiles [sic]."

You get called a pedophile over and over again, and eventually, even though the claims are baseless and cruel, a dark part of yourself starts to believe it.

It's psychological warfare

Society was not kind to queer people growing up (in some ways, it still isn't). I remember how the headlines used to go in my childhood. Politicians would be interviewed about their anti-queer views, and they would paint LGBTQIA+ people as almost aliens incapable of doing the things "normal" Americans can. Organizations like the Westboro Baptist Church would make all sorts of ridiculous claims like homosexuality being responsible for hurricanes and soldiers' deaths, and they would get air time and attention from the media (they are still active, by the way).

This background noise taught me a lot of unhealthy things about my queer identity: that I was sinful, that I should be ashamed, that I was dangerous. It's hard for that kind of stuff not to seep in. I have done a lot of work to unlearn these messages, but the one drilled into me still is my profound discomfort being around children. I do not think I belong around them — a belief reinforced by conservatives all throughout my life.

I hate this, and more to the point, I hate the people who made me think this way. I know I'll eventually unlearn it, and given the number of queer parents out there, many already have, but f@ck those who made that unlearning necessary.

Calling someone a groomer or a pedophile just because they are queer is not a victimless crime. It is a profound type of psychological warfare that warps the minds of the intended targets, and I wish all those who do this a lifetime of uneasiness.