This was originally inside a conversation but it seems like a topic worth bringing up as its own top-level post. The CW is vague because frankly this applies to a lot of subcultures and whatever variation of The Discourse you prefer.

The original context was about feeling safe in an uncommon identity (not so uncommon around these parts, but uncommon generally), and feeling much less so as a subculture eats itself in Discourse:

Being Weird has never been safe. It never will be. If it’s safe, it’s not weird anymore. Most of what humans do socially is to try to make behaviors in people they don’t understand unsafe: that is, if it isn’t a problem on its own, make it a problem until the Weird thing goes away.

Whenever anything Weird looks like it’s getting normalized, then normal people move in, and whatever inside the Weird space was getting covered by being observed almost entirely by Weird people now has to deal with Normal people and That Is Usually A Problem.

Subcultures fighting for acceptance are rarely prepared to reach it, because the obnoxious crap they were dealing with from Normal people was shielding them from the obnoxious crap they’d deal with in their own community if it got a sizable contingent of genuinely normal people. Subcultures are only innately resistant to intolerance as long as they are abhorrent to intolerant people; when the stigma is gone, everyday run-of-the-mill intolerance rapidly arrives in the community. I don’t mean “and then the racists and fascists and nazis show up!”, I mean “and then the people who object vehemently to things they don’t understand or aren’t into show up”.