The political distinctiveness of gays and lesbians: explaining protest actions across sexual identities

ABSTRACT

This study explores the relationship between people’s sexual identities and their tendencies to join political protests. When analyzing American National Election surveys from 2012 (n = 3813), gays and lesbians were more than twice as likely to protest as heterosexuals. To explain the increased activism of gays and lesbians, this study applied Patrick Egan’s theories of political distinctiveness to the ANES data. After running a set of hierarchal logistic regressions, the link between sexualities and protesting became insignificant when issues of age, education levels, friendships circles, group memberships, and political ideologies were introduced into regressions. This suggests that gays and lesbians protested more often because they are younger, more educated, integrated into political networks, and are more likely to notice the negative consequences of social inequalities than heterosexuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• gays and lesbians
• political participation
• protest movements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Terms like heterosexism, homophobia, heteronormativity, sexual prejudice, and compulsory heterosexuality have been used for the denial, policing, and mistreatment of non-heterosexual identities. I focus the concept heterosexism because it highlights the institutional practices that denies, denigrates, and stigmatizes any non-heterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship, or community (Herek 2004). Similar to institutionalized racism and sexism, heterosexism pervades groups and organizations and share some possible parallels with other forms of racism, antisemitism, and sexism.