As the infuriating scene plays out, all that ran through my head was of course. Of course one hate-filled man ruined a beautiful moment — which, surely, are few and far between given, well, everything else — for Ellie and Dina, tainting the memory of their first kiss forever. Of course no one else in the crowd (besides a late-to-the-scene Joel) offers them any support. Of course queerness is still under attack even as the outside world succumbs to crisis. It’s the reality we live in, after all. Currently, the ACLU is tracking 563 bills across the U.S. that are targeting the LGBTQ+ community in a myriad of harmful and dangerous ways, and, last fall, the FBI released a report that revealed they had recorded 2,936 anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in 2023, up around 8.6 percent from 2022. In Canada, where I’m from, police-reported hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community jumped a devastating 69 percent in 2023 from the year before, and Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party who is currently campaigning to become the next Prime Minister, is on record spewing transphobic rhetoric.
