Sexual identities & participation in liberal & conservative social movements: the greater activism of gays and lesbians also crossed over to recent Occupy Wall Street, peace, & environmental mobilizations

Sexual identities and participation in liberal and conservative social movements. Eric Swank. Social Science Research, Volume 74, August 2018, Pages 176-186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.04.002

Abstract: The desire for social change, political activism, and sexual identities may all be related. Lesbians and gays generally contest heterosexism more than heterosexuals but we do not know how sexual identities sways participation in class, race, and gender based social movements. When analyzing the American National Election Surveys of 2012 (n = 3519), gays and lesbians were about twenty times more likely to join LGB justice campaigns than heterosexuals. Moreover, the greater activism of gays and lesbians also crossed over to recent Occupy Wall Street, peace, and environmental mobilizations. Finally, this analysis ends with logistic regressions that determine if any sexual identity gaps in movement participation are the result of demographic, contextual, and ideological covariates.