The course was called The Media and L.G.B.T.Q.+ Americans. Both remind me of darker days - and of how far, at least in some respects, we’ve progressed toward the light. One reason is the course I taught during the just-concluded fall semester, my first at Duke University, and another is the thematically related book that I finally had time to start reading after the course’s end. So why don’t I feel entirely glum? Why don’t the feelings within me precisely match the chatter around me, which is that everything is getting worse? There is, in other words, a glut of grim. Our political leaders seem either lost or at a loss. There’s a fierce and terrifying attack on democracy underway in the United States, in which ideological differences grow ever sharper, tribal rivalries get ever uglier and a pandemic that should have brought us together drives us farther and farther apart. That prospect has instilled a kind of existential dread in the globe’s younger denizens, and understandably so. We are speeding - or should I say sizzling? - toward disaster. That’s no exaggeration, as The Times Opinion section’s recent canvass of the effects of climate change around the globe demonstrated.
