Document Type
Student Paper
Publication Date
Fall 2025
Recommended Citation
Salter, Samantha, "Manufactured Monstrosity: Analyzing and Challenging the Narrative of LGBTQ+ Terrorism" (2025). Colorado Law Student Scholars. 7.
https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/colorado-law-student-scholars/7
Comments
The monsterization and scapegoating of the LGBTQ+ community has been an unfortunate and recurring theme throughout history. This trend often coincides with waves of manufactured or exaggerated societal panic, leading to unfounded associations between members of the LGBTQ+ community and groups or ideologies that the government or conservative movements label as being threatening to national security and/or social order. After the label “national security risk” is applied, members of the LGBTQ+ community face attacks on established rights, and government surveillance on advocate groups chills activism. Also common, "aggressive heterosexual patriotism” tends to take hold of the public narrative and dehumanize those who fail to fit into white, Christian, heterosexual, and gender-normative archetypes of country-loving traditionalists. The modern societal monster that is the terrorist, a malleable and arguably definitionless term used to categorize any supposed threat to social order, has been applied to and weaponized against LGBTQ+ individuals, groups, and movements during moments of fraught national and global tension. This delegitimizes strides towards widespread acceptance and is used to justify legal efforts that undermine the push for equality. When the executive branch applies the term, the categorization itself creates a barrier to questioning or challenging the categorization, as matters of national security invoke deference to the Executive. The resulting power imbalance dilutes the ability of the labeled parties to defend themselves legally or in the public eye, increasing the likelihood that false narratives will prevail and influence. This paper will analyze this trend in three parts.