A lot of conservative ideology is to be nostalgic for an idealised version of past hierarchies. If we could just return to the social relations of the good old days, all the problems of present society would be solved. If your culture did not traditionally accept openly queer people, the presence of LGBTQ people becomes a problem to be solved in the reactionary mind.

One of the other important “traditional” hierarchies to most conservatives is that of gender which can explain the rage many of them feel towards queer people, especially against trans women, who are seen as subverting gender roles.

Conservatives don’t have to be openly homophobic though and societies can develop in ways that produced superficially pro-LGBT reactionaries. Nordic societies are less tolerant of open homophobia than many other places and anti-LGBT sentiment doesn’t translate into political power.

Instead the reactionaries there have adopted what can best be described as rainbow racism. Although they drag their heels whenever anyone talks of expanding them, the conservatives there have adopted a superficial support for LGBTQ rights but have done so in a reactionary way where being accepting of queer people is added to the list of virtues that makes the civilised Aryans superior to the savages of “the jungle”.

The cis-het “nuclear family” with paterfamilias as petty dictator, sex as procreative and pleasurable for the male partner rather than mutually pleasurable is inherently reactionary. Likely quite rare throughout human history too. This idealized version of sexuality stands in opposition to queer expressions of all kinds.

Having grown up and lived in a few countries across Asia during my youth, and even taken part in helping with the activism organized by local social democratic parties in the late 2000s, I can only give my personal impressions on how things had changed in the region, mostly through interacting with the older generations (leftists and otherwise).

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new wave of young Western-educated professional class began to return to their home countries, brought back new Western liberal ideas to otherwise traditionally conservative societies and vowing to reform their home countries and transition into an advanced economy.

These people would form new centrist neoliberal political parties and fashioning the ideology as the Third Way politics (which was pushed by Clintonite Democrats in the US but especially hard by the Blairite New Labour Party in the UK, which won them the historic landslide election on May Day, 1997). The idea is that they are not your traditional left or right wing parties, but represented the third “middle of the road” way that transcended the traditional left-right divide.

The main thrust of these new centrist liberal politics focused on fighting corruption and bringing social justice and technocracy to reform a society already falling behind the times. You see, the reason that our country is poor and underdeveloped is not because of capitalism and imperialism, but because our right-wing leaders are corrupt and our way of thinking is outdated. We can all become part of the advanced countries we see in the West, we just need to fight corruption and adopt modern Western liberal values.

Immediately, this was already splitting the working class votes against the more established left wing parties. More than that, younger people are generally more progressive and they are naturally attracted to such new ideas, so these younger Western-educated professional class also began to take over the youth wing of leftist parties as well, often pitting against the older generation party members, who saw their takeover as hostile and an overemphasis on social justice rather than the class struggle they had been fighting for their entire lives, a path they think is doomed to fail. Often the reformism is far from radical and even liberal in nature (i.e. anti-labor), which would allow foreign capitalist powers to easily maneuver into the domestic market and destroy whatever hard-earned worker’s rights they had fought for over the years.

This represented a new and perhaps even more effective means of spreading neoliberal ideology across the world, not by employing right wing paramilitary death squads to coup left wing governments (though it still happens), but through an ideological indoctrination of the overseas students who came to study in Western institutions, who would then bring the seeds back to their home countries and allow it to germinate there.

A couple things to note here: first, when we’re talking about the 1990s and early 2000s, it bears to remember that most people had already become disillusioned with socialism and communism as an alternative system to capitalism. The USSR had fallen, all the post-Soviet states had already opened up to liberal reforms, North Korea was undergoing a severe famine, China wasn’t even something that resembles a strong economy yet. The resurgence of socialist and communist ideas among the youth is more recent trend than you think, not just in the West but across the Global South as well.

Second, while even the West had yet to fully accept what we take for granted as progressive values today, like the LGBT movements as mainstream, the push was already happening in those countries and their ideas were being carried back by Western-educated students.

However, this new wave of centrist or left-leaning movements would soon fail to make a clear material impact on the society. In some countries, the right-wing governments were able to exploit the conservatism of the society to pit the voters against the centrist parties. In others, the victory of neoliberal parties (and social democratic parties with neoliberal platforms) led to even worse material outcome for the vast majority of the people. In almost every case, liberal reform has invariably been a failure in the Global South.

The failures of liberal reform would in turn give way to the return of right-wing governments. Working class voters saw this as a betrayal, which had led to even more worker’s rights being stripped away to make way for foreign multi-national corporations to exploit, so whether consciously or not, these new liberal reformers are effectively functioning as “foreign agents”. Local petty bourgeoisie soon found themselves incapable of competing with foreign companies with huge capital, and flocked to nationalist right-wing parties.

This turns into a vicious cycle that enables a perpetual shift towards the right, with no end in sight. The fact is that no amount of reform will be able to fix a country that has been deliberately positioned in such a way that is vulnerable to foreign imperialism. Every move you make, you end up worse. For example, let’s say the new government wants to nationalize a certain natural resources, what happens? You get sanctioned, the exchange rate falls, the debt multiplied, and you end up with an even more unpopular government than the previous right-wing government, who would then use the opportunity to appeal to their conservative base and distract them from the obvious looting going on by the crony capitalists.

a really whole lot of it is hegemonic christianity, either directly in euro cultures, introduced by colonizers centuries ago, or american churches backing anti-gay laws in africa more recently.

i’m not sure where you’d find boomers being boomers about gay stuff that wasn’t traceable to the catholic or east orthodox church. maybe china?

I would say the most fundamental reason is that it others and divides people, which is extremely useful for capital.

Gender roles are law to them and those who subvert their designated role are to be punished

Gender and sexuality was already pretty cisheteronormative in Christian Europe from my understanding. Contrast this with other societies that have several gender roles. Capitalism in Europe led to the traditional extended family structure developing into the nuclear family, further reinforcing the gender binary. I am not sure if this was inevitable due to capitalism, or a consequence of capitalism developing out of European culture. Either way, it was then forced on nearly every other culture in the world. Nations were either colonized and had much of their culture suppressed, or Westernized themselves as part of their industrialization. Conservatives are defenders of capitalist ideology, thus they love the nuclear family and hate nonbinary (neither cis male or female) gender. Genuine reactionaries - that is, people who want to truly go back to pre-capitalist society - don’t really exist, and the closest thing are the trads that pick and choose, like stanning both absolute monarchies and nuclear families.

If you really boil it down, I think it was first about efficiently breeding as many colonizers as possible, and by now the religious institutions have established hegemony.

as I understand it a lot of that was exported back out from american evangelicals to everywhere else

For a big chunk of Asia, one of the main reasons is the Brits or French or Americans showing up and forcing the criminalization of homosexuality at gun point. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the one Asian country to completely resist/escape colonization (Thailand) is also the most accepting of non-Binary people.

Depends on who you want to focus on. Any conservative can come up with any reason in their head (“it’s grotty”, “god says no”), but these aren’t very good explanations for why its a cultural throughline in conservativism.

I think over time there was a focus on patrilineal property inheritance that slowly spread from the upper class lords down into the middle classes over centuries (say, from the slow death of Rome to late “feudalism” and early industrial revolution). If your kid is queer in some way (particularly first born males), its less likely your property is “secure”. The truck and barter of women (or more specifically, wombs) to provide strong healthy heirs would also lend itself to being anti-LGBT. While I could imagine that rationally a gay first born son may “do his duty”, it seems pretty unlikely as the aristocracy and the church had a vested interest in keeping things this way (also, the Church sometimes got new clergy from aristocratic queers rejecting the system, which also served as hostages and tighter connections of sorts).

There is this idea of a homogenised past, but I have a suspicion that outside of the aristocracy and clergy that directly associate with them, small villages would have had wildly varying language and culture. The peasantry has less of an incentive to track the inheritance of property, so it seems very likely to me that at least some English villages (say) may have had fairly accepting queer culture. It would be quite hard to study as they didn’t write anything down. A part of the liberal-national revolutions is setting out to create the idea of a nation. Someone wrote a book about the French nationalist project, which destroyed a huge amounts of variation in culture in the French countryside. I don’t remember what it was called, sorry. I imagine the English/British one was a lot slower (started earlier, aristocracy never quite fell out of favour etc), and still today one can comment of every other village having its own accent (a relic). This wouldn’t be to idealise the past either, I imagine some villages took their Christianity very seriously and were very homophobic/traditionalist.

The Church also inherited the idea of Pater Familias from the Romans, the idea that the father of the household owned the other subjects of his house (his wife, his slaves, his children). This is obviously a big part of the patriarchy. You can still see this concept rear its ugly head today in certain forms of daddly masculinity, but it isn’t a legal concept now. How much the Church enforced this down to random villages in France would be hard to tell; lots of people were illiterate.

Liberalism and Nationalism, the twin thoughts that permeate our society, inherited many things from the previous feudal system. There was a great migration from the countryside to the cities as farming became more and more efficient. The former middle classes (see: financiers, artisans, merchants) often already in cities became the dominant class (over time) and were faced with a large supply of cheap labour. Not only was this cheap labour useful in outcompeting traditional artisans with division of labour, but it also allowed the middle classes to essentially create a new society centered around massively populated cities (e.g. London, France). The division of labour in farming also helped fuel the reproduction of this society. This new society, based around the locuses of trade, were the new “nations” that were able to leverage vastly more military power both in personnel and material than the traditional aristocracies (look at battle sizes in Europe in the 13th century compared to the 19th century). 2000 Horse-back riding aristo-fucks may have trained since birth to put down peasant rebellions, but a musket shot from a barn will put them down just the same. (NB: Settler colonies evolved a little differently, which is why Canada, Australia, and the US look wildly different to France, the UK, Belgium etc. However, they may have been necessary for the formation of nationalism back in Europe with the vast wealth plundered from Turtle Island, massively enriching trading cities)

The way families and masculinity interacted with Capitalism wasn’t a direct one-one path. The Pater Familias turned into the division of labour of the reproduction of society. Just as in a factory one specific guy pulls this lever every five seconds, one specific guy sands down some points etc, so does the woman reproduce society daily (by preparing the household, and specifically the man, for work) and reproduce society generationally (by being an incubator for the next generation). No nationalist ever talks about this particularly openly (at least in my experience), but when they’re feeling stressed about their nation’s position it comes out about birth rates and the like. However, the echoes of Pater Familias still exist today amongst certain sort of domineering men who think they own their families.

Likewise, the concern over primogeniture and lines of male inheritance have been twisted to serve the same goals. We want more of our nation, we see ourselves in competition with other nations partly defined by wealth but partly defined by sheer numbers and control over territory, and we think queer people stand in the way of reproduction our nation and are insufficiently loyal to the nation.

This also has a lot of explanatory power outside of just anti-queer politics. Anti-feminism and anti-migrant sentiment also come from this. Anti-abortion stuff as well.

(Uh… I hope this made sense, I’m feeling a lot of energy today)

For superpowers and countries that have regional conflicts (usually cold conflicts), the idea is that women are weak, gay men are effeminate thus they would be weak soldiers. For whatever reason, their military is based and strong and can turn any limp wrist teenager into a special forces killer, but they can’t turn a supposedly weak, gay man into a basic soldier lol. Says more about the military than homosexuality.

religion