Just came back to add that in the US and the UK, the subcultures where homophobia still seems to be rife are fundamentalist religious ones - conservative Christians especially from the Bible Belt in the US, and conservative Muslims in the UK. To the extent that these populations are growing in those countries, homophobia is probably on the rise.

But amongst the broader, more secular US and UK culture and general public, the climate today towards homosexuality in general is a far cry from the days of Section 28 in the UK and the era in the US when public figures like Anita Bryant, and both the Reagans and the Clintons in the White House espoused callous, openly homophobic views and preached policies that said homosexuals should be denied basic rights (the right to marry, to be on a partner's health insurance, to inherit/partake of partner's pension or SS, to adopt/have a family life, to get decent health care and be treated with dignity & compassion for those with HIV-AIDS, to customary mortuary services in the event of AIDS, to be able to considered next of kin in order to make medical decisions for an incapacitated partner, to be able to visit a partner in hospital or hospice, to plan/attend partner's funeral, to not be subjected to employment or housing discrimination based on sexual orientation) and also should be excluded from various spheres (nursery, elementary and even HS school teaching; the military; macho sports and leagues like the NFL and NBA; coaching positions; leadership in organizations like scouting; on-screen roles in broadcast news; reporting on matters like AIDS).

Today in the UK, Stonewall and other "LGBT" orgs are financially supported by national and local governments and relied on as main advisers to every branch of the state from the police to the Crown Prosecution Service to schools. Gay men like Peter Tatchell, Elton John, Stephen Fry, Owen Jones, Matt Lucas, Douglas Murray and Andrew Doyle are well-respected and have large public platforms. Daffyd "the only gay in the village" from Wales is a well-beloved character. Many of these men are considered national treasures in the UK, and have been honored by the Queen, Elton John with a knighthood.

Similarly, in the US, orgs like GLAAD, HRC and Athlete Ally get tons of funding, and politicians court them for their endorsements. A number of major news anchors and talking head pundits who appear on the biggest TV channels in the US - including Fox News - are openly homosexual, and there is no hue and cry from the public, not even from religious conservatives. A gay man with little political experience was a candidate for POTUS this year, and he was taken seriously largely based on his being gay, which was seen as akin to a professional credential that gave him extra gravitas, wisdom and voter appeal. Ellen Degeneres went from being a comedian very much in the closet to being the out-and-proud host of what I believe is now the most-watched daytime talk show amongst the broad and varied American public.

However, I fear there might be a countervailing trend afoot among the very young. As the homophobia of so many TRAs shows, and the internalized homophobia of so many of the young people - especially teen girls & young women - who are now becoming convinced it's better to be trans than gay also makes painfully clear, it also seems that anti-gay animus and revulsion is perhaps rising amongst young people who've grown up on the internet.

On the surface, most of these young people are supposedly gung-ho supporters of the "LGBTQ-ETC, ETC." But deep down, a whole lot of them seem to be quite squeamish and even repulsed about the idea of physically engaging in sex with another person, in much the same way that little kids are when they learn about how babies are made and say "yuk! I'm never gonna do that." And it seems like many might be most squeamish of all about the idea of IRL sex between two people whose bodies are both of their own sex. Hence, we have teen girls today utterly obsessed with fuzzy, gauzy, fantasies of gay male sex in "slash" fiction about male-on-male sex written by females for females, and young men claiming that "lesbian sex" can involve two guys with dicks, nd that lots of "women" enjoy getting blow jobs from other "women" who also like getting their dicks sucked.

I wonder if one reason for this might be because today's young people are far less experienced than previous generations in real-life romantic and sexual relationships, and so many of them have low self-esteem and serious body-image issues. They are saturated with sexual material, much of it grotesque, via their screens and most/many of them seem plenty proficient at masturbating. But at the same time, so many/most appear never to have had a RL BF or GF, held someone's hand romantically, had their first romantic kiss, or felt the heady frisson that charges the air with a special kind of electricity when in close physical contact to someone with whom one shares a strong, mutual sexual attraction. If they have had sex with another person, it often seems mechanistic, transactional and onanistic - not at all romantic. The sort of stuff that might get them to cum, but not cause the heart to flutter.

Also at the same time, tweens, teens and young adults spend more time than any generation in history alone in their rooms or bathrooms looking at and studying themselves in the mirror, taking endless photos of themselves and painstakingly altering them so they give just the right (fake, unrealistic) impression to others, worrying about and trying on "identities" and labels as if they were clothes at deeply-discounted designer sample sale, and fretting about and trying invent ways to control how other people perceive and refer to them.

So many young people nowadays pretend to be sexually savvy and sophisticated, and intellectually they might be, but as far as hands-on physical and emotional closeness with a RL partner goes, they often are complete naifs and total rubes who have no "lived experience" at all. So many seem utterly obsessed with how they and others look, but completely disconnected from living in their own bodies and fully experiencing the feelings, functions and capabilities of their own bodies - and the bodies of others in a tactile, connected, flesh-on-flesh way. They are often ultra-focused on how their bodies and the bodies of others look, and they are extremely critical of their own and other people's bodies for not looking Instagram perfect, but they seem less appreciative of other aspects of bodies beyond appearance. The only sexual function many seem into is orgasming, not deeply communing with another person in a mutual way - and certainly not "making love." Many of them seem to feel unusually fearful, anxious, put off and even repelled by the prospect of being in a RL situation where their own flawed human body made of flesh, blood, flab and bone would have naked sexual congress with another human being's equally flesh and blood, equally flawed body.