Goodbye, ‘Queer Eye.’ Goodbye, Queer Acceptance.

Ms. Rankin-Gee is a novelist. Her forthcoming novel, “My Only Boy,” is about a lesbian and a gay man who fall in love.

When the final season of “Queer Eye” dropped this year, it did so with too little fanfare: a scant five episodes and a late, fleeting appearance on the Netflix home page for someone who had faithfully cried over all previous episodes — me. The show’s low-key farewell could be down to well-documented intracast disputes or air dissipating from a franchise that has run for nearly a decade. But the end of “Queer Eye” also dovetails with a second story: the beginning of a precipitous fall in the acceptance of gayness in mainstream American culture. It’s a particularly bitter aftertaste for a show that placed the pursuit of acceptance at its heart.

I am a lesbian in my late 30s, around the same age as the “Queer Eye” cast. Many of our microgeneration missed........

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