Predicting Ambivalence: When Same-Sex Sex is Only “Sometimes Wrong”

ABSTRACT

Despite Americans’ growing acceptance of LGBTQ people and their sexual behaviors over the past 40 years, approximately 10% of the population consistently expresses conflicted feelings, reporting that same-sex sex is only sometimes wrong. This research employs a theory of socially structured ambivalence to examine how individuals with ambivalence toward the morality of same-sex sex differ from those with strong moral stances. Using multinomial regression analysis of General Social Survey data, we find that socio-structural conflicts—e.g. simultaneous membership in institutions with conflicting normative messages—are predictive of ambivalent attitudes, and the presence of these structured conflicts appears to have a cumulative effect. These findings provide evidence of the predictive power of socially structured conflicts in producing ambivalent attitudes and expand the existing literature on ambivalence and attitudes about same-sex relations. We propose that scholars conceptualize ambivalence as a distinctly socio-structural and relational construct that may help to signal fertile ground for social change.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual relations
• same-sex
• sex
• ambivalence
• attitudes
• structured conflict
• LGBTQ

Notes

¹ Merton called this concept “structured sociological ambivalence.” We use the term socially structured ambivalence to emphasize the potential for interdisciplinary applications of the concept.

² Indeed, Alwin and Krosnic (1991) found that attitudinal measures with an even number of response categories (like that which we use) are more reliable than odd-numbered scales that offer a true middle point.

³ The first cohort consists of people born before 1918, a time when the term homosexual was not yet invented and a strict dichotomy of sexuality was not yet constructed (Katz, 1995). The second cohort, people born in 1919–1945, saw a distinct cultural shift in the nature and purpose of dating in the United States, when the idea of dating and marrying for love rather than for utility changed the nature of sexual relationships in the United States permanently. This cohort also saw the entrance of “homosexuality” in the Oxford dictionary defined in terms of eroticism for the same sex (Katz, 1995). The third cohort (1946–1969) includes people who were born post–World War II, during a time when “homosexuality” became illegal and was registered as a disease in the psychology Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM). Cohort four (1970–1986) was born after the famous Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, NY, which is commonly considered to be one of the most significant events in LGBTQ rights history, leading to wider recognition of the LGBTQ rights movement (Armstrong, 2002). The final cohort (1987–1997) was born during the height of the AIDS crisis in the United States and at the beginning of activist work from groups such as ACT-UP that challenged the government’s response to a disease framed as a “gay” (Armstrong, 2002). Those born before 1918 were chosen as the referent based on chronology.

⁴ The base outcome was alternated in each multinomial logistic regression model to compare ambivalent attitudes to, first, “never wrong” and then, second, “always wrong.” This provides the necessary analysis for conflicts predicting ambivalence over both other categorical options.