Who Is the Pervert?

On Fear, the ‘Other,’ and Whether Any of This Can Be Changed

Two people are alone in their bedroom. The door is closed. They are sharing themselves with each other — the most intimate, private version of who they are — in the one place the world is supposed to leave them alone. And then, without warning or invitation, someone bursts through the door. They are loud. They are furious. They begin cataloging everything wrong with what they see — the wrongness of the bodies, the wrongness of the love, the wrongness of the whole enterprise. They demand that it stop. They threaten. They legislate.

In this story, I want you to tell me: who is the pervert? Who is the threat? And whose rights are actually being violated?

Because here is the thing about that scenario — the intruder chose to be there. The couple did not invite them. The couple’s love affected the intruder exactly as much as it would have if the door had stayed closed, which is to say not at all. Whatever happened in that room had zero bearing on the intruder’s marriage, their business, their church, their children’s breakfast, or the price of eggs. And yet there they stand, apoplectic, certain that what they are witnessing is a crime against nature and that they, specifically, have been wronged by it.

How does a person arrive at that conviction? How do we, as a society, get to a place where the political agenda of the moment is organized almost entirely around the project of making other people’s private lives illegal? And the question that keeps me up at night, “Is there any way back?”

We Have Always Needed an “Other”

Let me offer two premises that I believe are true simultaneously, even though they sit uncomfortably next to each other.

The first: prejudice is not primarily about logic. It is about fear. Research in intergroup psychology identifies what scholars call “symbolic threats,” the fear that an out-group’s values or identity will challenge your own, as the most persistent and durable source of prejudice, forming what researchers describe as the “solid core” of hatred that tends to outlast every rational counterargument. This is not stupidity. It is a deeply human response to perceived threat, even when that threat is imaginary.

The second: that fear does not generate itself out of nothing. It is cultivated. Researchers describe radicalization as a process in which charismatic leaders and structured groups manipulate individuals through propaganda and indoctrination — shaping their beliefs and motivations to align with the group’s ideology. The fear comes first, yes, but someone hands it a target. Someone points at the bedroom door and says, “In there. That is what is destroying everything you love.”

Both things are true at once. The soil is human and ancient. The seeds have been deliberately planted.

We have always needed someone to blame. When the economy collapses, when the culture shifts faster than people can absorb, when the world stops resembling the one where someone grew up and felt safe, the psychological demand for a simple explanation becomes almost irresistible. Authoritarian leaders exploit this tendency by providing a convenient enemy — a group to blame for the turmoil. Through relentless propaganda, these groups are framed as threats to security, morality, or prosperity, and the emotional appeal of such narratives often overrides rational thought.

The targets change. The Jews. The Catholics. The Communists. The immigrants. The gay couple in the bedroom. The trans child at the water fountain. What remains consistent is the architecture: find a group that cannot easily defend itself, assign them responsibility for everything that frightens you, and build a movement around the project of making them smaller.

The Narcissistic Charismatic and the Cult of Identity

There is a specific type of leader who is very good at this. You have met them throughout history; you are meeting them again now. They are charismatic in the way that a fire is charismatic — warm and compelling until you are too close, and then consumed. Researchers who study cult dynamics identify two essential qualities: charisma, which draws people in, and authoritarianism, which keeps them there. Without charisma, the leader cannot recruit. Without authoritarianism, they cannot maintain control.

What makes these figures uniquely dangerous is not that they invent hatred — it is that they find hatred that already exists in the culture, give it a name, give it an enemy, and make belonging to the movement feel like love. The charismatic leader becomes central to followers’ identity; their accomplishments are mythologized, and when external information seems to challenge the leader, followers develop rationalizations to protect the leader’s special status — and, by extension, their own. To question the leader is to question yourself. To leave is to lose your tribe.

This is not a political observation. It is a psychological one, and it applies across the ideological spectrum wherever the formula appears: a charismatic figure, a frightened in-group, a designated “other,” and a steady supply of misinformation to keep the fear fresh.

The misinformation matters more than people realize. Social media platforms serve as entry points where extremist content, often disguised as news or humor, is widely accessible, strategically designed to manipulate vulnerable individuals. What used to require a preacher and a congregation now requires only an algorithm and a scroll. The bedroom door gets kicked in faster and with less effort than ever before, and the people doing the kicking have been told, repeatedly and convincingly, that they are the victims.

The Harm That Isn’t There

Let us be precise about the gay marriage example, because it is instructive.

Two people of the same sex get married. They exchange rings. They go home. They build a life. They pay taxes, mow a lawn, argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes, raise children, and grow old together. How, in any material sense, does this affect the straight Christian couple in the house across the street? Their marriage remains legal. Their church remains free to conduct its ceremonies as it sees fit. Their children are not recruited, converted, or in any way altered by the fact of their neighbors’ happiness. The fabric of their daily existence is unchanged.

And yet there are people who will fight, with genuine passion and real political energy, to make that marriage illegal again. Not because of harm — there is no harm. Because of what it represents. Because someone told them that the existence of that marriage is a symbolic threat to the meaning of their own, they believed it, and that belief has become their identity.

This is what makes the bedroom intruder such a clarifying image. The intrusion is the point. The intrusion reveals that what is actually being defended is not a right but a hierarchy — the comfort of knowing that some ways of loving count more than others, that some people’s private lives are subject to public approval. When you strip away the rhetoric, the “harm” being protected against is simply the knowledge that somewhere, a door is closed, and you are not in charge of what happens behind it.

There is another argument that gets hurled at the bedroom door regularly, and it deserves the same plain examination. The word is indoctrination — and it has become the preferred accusation of those who believe that LGBTQ+ visibility in schools, in media, in public life, is an act of recruitment. Let us be precise about what that word actually means. Indoctrination is the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs or doctrines uncritically, which requires, by definition, that the thing being taught is something the person would not otherwise arrive at on their own. Which raises an uncomfortable question for the argument: how exactly does one indoctrinate someone into the color of their eyes?

Because that is what we are actually talking about. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not elective courses. They are not ideologies adopted after sufficient exposure to the right curriculum. The research is unambiguous — being a member of the LGBTQ+ community is as written into the fiber of a person’s being as the curl in their hair or the particular shade of their skin. You can no more recruit someone into homosexuality than you can teach them to need oxygen. What schools and libraries and representation actually do, the thing that frightens the intruder so profoundly, is not create LGBTQ+ children. It is, let the ones who already exist know they are not alone. It tells a child who has been quietly bewildered by their own heart that there is a name for what they feel, and that the name is not shameful.

The indoctrination argument is not just flawed. It is precisely backward. The child sitting in a classroom being told that families only look one way, that love only counts in one configuration, that certain ways of being are unnatural or sinful — that child is being indoctrinated. The LGBTQ+ child reading a book that reflects their experience for the first time is simply being seen.

Can Hearts Change? The Evidence Is More Hopeful Than the Headlines

Here is where I want to be honest about how hard this is and what the research actually says.

You cannot argue someone out of a fear-based belief. Facts do not penetrate identity. If they did, we would have solved this already, because the facts about gay marriage, that it harms no one, have been available for decades. The people who oppose it know the facts. The facts are not the point.

What does work, as it turns out, is proximity. In a meta-analysis of 515 studies, researchers found that in 94% of cases, greater intergroup contact corresponded with lower levels of prejudice. The mechanism is not greater knowledge of the out-group. It is reduced anxiety and increased empathy that come from simply being in the same room as someone whose humanity you can no longer comfortably deny.

Put differently, you can dismiss a category. You cannot as easily dismiss a person who has looked you in the eye, made you laugh, helped you when you needed it, or trusted you with something real. Studies have found that heightened perspective-taking and empathy play a larger role in reducing prejudice than greater knowledge of the out-group, which means that storytelling, relationships, and shared experience are more powerful tools than argument.

This is not a comfortable conclusion for those of us who believe in the power of a well-made case. But it is also, if you sit with it, a quietly hopeful one. It means that every friendship across a line of difference is a small act of resistance against the architecture of othering. It means that the couple whose neighbors eventually attended their wedding, not because they were convinced by an argument but because they had dinner together first, are doing something that matters.

Researchers have found that even indirect contact helps — that simply knowing an in-group member who has a close relationship with an out-group member improves attitudes toward that out-group as a whole. Visibility, in other words, is not just a political act. It is a psychological one. Every LGBTQ+ person who has ever been the first one their colleague, cousin, or congregation member has knowingly known has changed more minds than a thousand op-eds or the pleas of this journalist.

When Enough Is Enough

So, back to the door.

The intruder in the bedroom is not evil, necessarily. They are frightened. They have been told, by someone they trust and who gives them a sense of belonging, that what is behind that door is the reason their world is falling apart. They have been handed a target for a fear that was already there, waiting. They have been made to feel that their love only means something if someone else’s doesn’t.

I understand that. I have spent considerable energy in this article trying to explain it, because I believe that understanding how hatred is manufactured is the first step toward dismantling it.

But I want to stop here and say something that the research does not say, because the research does not have a conscience — only data.

It is not the couple’s job.

It is not the responsibility of the people whose door just got kicked in to remain patient, to extend empathy, to make themselves small enough, unthreatening enough, and relatable enough that the intruder eventually comes around. The literature on intergroup contact is real, and it is hopeful, but it places an exhausting and fundamentally unjust burden on the shoulders of the people already carrying the most weight. We do not ask Black Americans to befriend their way out of systemic racism. We do not ask women to patiently educate their harassers into decency. And we should stop implying — however gently — that LGBTQ+ people owe anyone a tutorial on their own humanity.

There is a point at which “change hearts and minds” becomes a way of saying: keep tolerating this while we wait for the people harming you to feel differently about it. And that point was reached a long time ago.

So when is enough, enough?

Enough is when a child drives four hours across a state line to see a doctor who will treat them as a human being. Enough is when a teenager calculates whether it is safe to hold their partner’s hand in a parking lot. Enough is when a family relocates everything they know because their state legislature decided their child was a political inconvenience. Enough was, arguably, June 28, 1969, when the people who had been told to survive by hiding decided they were done remaining quiet.

The intruder in the bedroom is not owed empathy. The couple is owed a door that locks, and a government that stands outside it with them rather than handing the intruder the key.

Hearts can change. They do change. Proximity works, and story works, and time works, and the long arc of history suggests that the side of love has always, eventually, won. I believe that. But believing it does not require us to assign the labor of that change to the people being harmed by the delay.

The work of dismantling manufactured hatred belongs to the culture that manufactured it — to the educators and the politicians and the media figures and the institutions and the quiet bystanders who watched the door get kicked in and said nothing. It belongs to the straight allies who have the proximity to power that their LGBTQ+ neighbors do not. It belongs to every person who has ever privately disagreed with the intruder and publicly stayed silent because it was easier.

The couple in the bedroom did not create this problem. They should not have to solve it alone.

And this, all of this, is bigger than one bedroom door. This is what I know, as a blind older woman who has spent a lifetime being someone else’s “other.” The mechanisms of othering do not discriminate in their targets. They come for the gay couple and the trans child and the Black family and the brown immigrant and the woman who speaks too loudly and the disabled person who takes up too much space and the elderly person who is no longer considered useful. The architecture is the same. The fear is the same. The manufactured enemy is whoever is most convenient, most visible, most vulnerable in this particular moment.

Which means the coalition writes itself, if we are willing to see it.

Gay, female, disabled, Black, brown, every person who has ever been made to feel like an intrusion in their own life, like a problem to be managed, like a door that needs to be kicked in. We are not separate stories. We are the same story, told over and over with different names. And if we were to stand together — all of us, in all of our magnificent, inconvenient, unerasable variety — there are too many of us to be made to feel small again.

That is not optimism. That is arithmetic.