As always, the primary contradiction is imperialism in general and US imperialism in particular. They hold everything back. And until the entire imperial core is dismantled and the periphery becomes truly sovereign, humanity will never progress beyond a certain point.

It's an old contradiction of imperialism eating a new one.

Lots of places have historical understandings of sexuality and gender where some people are assigned identities we'd understand as somewhere in the LGBTQ spectrum. But here come the old empires, enforcing a 19th century European gender binary and heteronormativity. Generations of colonized people end up internalizing and passing on those beliefs, even if they hate the empire itself. So when the new empires fly rainbow flags in June and claim they need apartheid to protect gay people from the savage hordes, that hatred remains and so do the colonized beliefs.

I really don’t know how to fix it or even talk about it.

You can start by pointing out that 50% of the countries that outlaw homosexuality have these laws on their book due to the British empire. There's also plenty of historical examples of pre-colonized societies all over the world recognizing more than two genders, and of being much more permissive of non-heterosexual behavior. This absolutely terrified colonizers, they brutally eradicated it all over the world and replaced it with their cishetnormative garbage. Queerphobia in the Global South is not only a Western export, it is also still zealously propped up by colonizer religions and by reactionary forces from the West (or Western allies like Saudi Arabia or Qatar) until this day.

Also, the idea that ANY Western nation is substantially pro-LGBT is laughable, idiotic nonsense that only cishets in their ignorant privilege can believe in and that serves to pinkwash governments that treat me as a third class citizen until this day. The trans exterminatory governments of the West are paying mere lip service to our rights, are giving out cost-neutral hand me downs to the LGBT community and do none of that out of the goodwill of their rotten, foul capitalist hearts, but show even this lukewarm display of performative tolerance only after literal decades of grassroots activism from queer people who had to do all the groundwork in re-normalizing our very existence and campaigned endlessly for our rights, fought in the streets against queerbashing cops and endured endless legal battles in the courts to ensure our right to live as ourselves is respected at least most of the time. LGBT acceptance is OUR work and OUR success alone and i want to piss in the face of every liberal cishet hypocrit who thinks i owe them anything. It's not a western value to treat me with dignity, that's something my community has fought tooth and nail for AGAINST the West and still has to fight for AGAINST the West and its awful, genocidal terror values.

The common belief is that queer people are some kind of American imperialist aggression to destabilize a country

but HOW

Yeah, I've never gotten how I'm supposed to handle that. What, am I supposed to sit there and let them shit talk me? Take one for the team? Fuck that.