Everything Old Can Be Made New Again: A Reemergence of the Groomer Panic in Conservative Attacks on the LGBTQ Community

During the height of Anita Bryant's campaign to defeat the Miami-Dade County ordinance which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, she described gay men as having to "recruit" children, through child abuse, to the gay "lifestyle." Similarly, the Trump White House, on the twenty-ninth of January 2025, released a Presidential Action aiming to purge schools of “indoctrination” into gender ideology. Accusations of recruitment of children by LGBTQ+ individuals, often referred to as the “Groomer Panic”, have been a mainstay of Conservative attacks on the queer community. In the wake of the first Trump presidency and the ascendency of a new far-right movement scorned by the success of Obergefell v. Hodges, the groomer panic has resurfaced, lobbed increasingly at the transgender community. What this attack on the transgender community exposes is the lack of real change in the types of narratives pushed by the far-right and the ways in which they have held fast to a core set of beliefs and ideologies. Whether it is the anti-gay backlash of the 1970s and 1980s or the anti-transgender backlash of the current moment, the underlying argument, that a queer cabal is out to recruit children, has remained the same. What the claim of “recruitment” into a queer lifestyle erases is the much stronger work being done by the far-right to recruit children into a heterosexual and cisgender lifestyle and to deny children the autonomy to make choices about their own identity. Through investigating the historical and contemporary moral panic around queer people as “groomers” I aim to understand how the far-right grooms’ children into compulsory heterosexual and attempts to deny the possibility of queer futurity in its attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. By framing queerness not as a natural occurrence but as a sinister outside force, the far-right both obscures their own existence as a sinister outside force – children, given their general state of tabula rasa upon birth are acted upon by almost exclusively outside forces – and aim to paint children as unreliable narrators of their own story, a dangerous precedent to set.