If you have the time and/or inclination then I recommend the Revolutions Podcast by Mike Duncan. The French Revolution is season 3, it's a long old listen but you'll get a comprehensive understanding of how and why things go wrong when ideologues take command.
The issue you have with the 'some of us want us to be dead or subservient' argument is the firm belief that it applies only to one half of the table. The religious right very firmly believe that the LGBTQ+ are a threat to their existence. They are of course absolutely wrong, but if a firm belief is all you need to absent yourself from talking, then both sides meet the criteria You could argue (and I do) that religion is stupid, but I would also argue that wokeism is sacrificing common sense at the altar of woke. It's a fast moving religion all of its own, its doctrine isn't fixed but it's adherents must adapt or face excommunication.
I think moderation is the best guard against authoritarianism that we have, and I think this because liberal societies gradually slide left. From 1950 - 206 western democracies slid liberal. It was a series of minor push pulls, but as a general rule, every generation was better off and in a more liberal society than the generation that preceded it. Here in the UK, a right-wing Government legalised gay marriage - the PM that did it was born into a world where homosexuality itself was illegal. There were struggles, there were campaigns, but broadly speaking through cultural exchange the world moved continually in the direction of liberal.
In short, the amount of people threatened with violence, degradation and suppression has dropped like a stone, whilst the perception of those things happening has shot up like a rocket. A lot of younger people are now walking around with crippling anxiety because they believe the world is far more opposed to them than it actually is - they see danger where mostly there is benign neutrality. Swathes of the LGBTQ+ community spend most of their time talking to each other about perceived threats that now everything but absolute agreement is hatred. That's how James Finn reacted, and perhaps it was, as you suggested, a threat response- but that means he needs to re-centre himself back to reality, not his subjective perception of it. If he was LGBTQ+ and writing in the 1930s, or writing in Saudi Arabia I'd perhaps understand his positioning better, but he isn't.
Given that we can't police people's thoughts - does it really matter that people are homophobic/bigoted/racist/evil as long as they don't attempt to hijack the legal system or control language? That's my position. You can't mandate what people think, you just live with it. The only way to control a population is multi-generational authoritarianism a la The Kim Family. I'm not going to allow that to happen either by the religious right, nor by the batshit identarian left - but at the moment, both groups are fuelling each other and have been for a decade - and the left (as you'll find out from the French Revolution) can never ever stop eating its own children. The right wing will win out and things will go back to the 1960s. History will wonder how we squandered liberal values - and then hopefully they'll find our chats and use us in History textbooks :o)
