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In print | March 6, 2008

Assistant professor of politics at NYU Patrick Egan ’92 returned to the college on Monday to give a lecture addressing why lesbians, gays and bisexuals tend to have distinctively Democratic and liberal views in the U.S., based on a survey he conducted.

Egan majored in sociology during his time at Swarthmore. He wrote his senior thesis on “how lesbians, gays and bisexuals fit into a broader progressive movement” and the connection between lesbians, gays and bisexuals as a minority group and other minority groups. He was advised by professor of sociology Joy Charlton, who is now Executive Director of the Lang Center.

Since his leaving the college, Egan has worked in journalism, public policy, gay and lesbian issues as well as other research areas.

As a researcher, he discovered that there was little research in the field of gay and lesbian issues and sought to fill the gap he saw in the literature. Increasing interest in gay, lesbian and bisexual issues has also pressured politicians to make these issues “an agenda item,” according to political science professor Rick Valelly ’75.

“The way [Egan] presented his conclusions was very lucid and on point. It was very easy to follow the methodology behind the number crunching,” Hansi Lo Wang ‘09 said. "This is just the beginning of the research in this field. I’m sure we will be seeing many more enlightening discoveries once we can get more data and widen the sample and demographics that we study."

Phoenix news reporter Mary Prager recently sat down with Egan for an exclusive interview.

Mary Prager: In a nutshell, what was your lecture about?

Patrick Egan: Essentially, it’s about how lesbians, gays and bisexuals establish distinctive political views in the United States … The reason that I’m studying this is that there’s sort of this puzzle, which is that generally, the way that groups become politically cohesive … or believe similar things about politics is through one of two mechanisms: one is that they’re raised in cultures that have these values, so you think about Jews tending to be liberal, or blacks tending to vote for Democrats. They’re raised in cultures that encourage and promote these kinds of political views.

In other groups, like say unions … you join a union and through contact with union members, you learn what it means to be a union voter, you know, you support Democrats or you support minimum wage, whatever.

Well, gay people actually, they’re not raised in gay cultures or gay families, generally, and so people say, “Oh, the reason that gay people are so liberal is that they have contact with other gay people, they learn these political values and attitudes from other gay people,” and I started the talk by sort of showing lots of examples of how gay people are quite politically distinctive. They’re more likely to vote for Democrats than straight people, more likely to identify as liberals, but also more likely to be liberal on a whole bunch of things that have nothing to do with gay rights, like more likely to be environmentalists, disapprove of the Iraq war, etc.

All this leads me to think that something more profound is going on than just gay people saying, well, which party is best for gay people, and I’m gong to vote for [that party], because it seems to be the sort of basket of beliefs that come together for, typically, lesbians and gays.

What I [did] in the talk is to show that there are two other ways that gay people become distinctive that have nothing to do with whether or not they have contact with other gay people.

With a survey that I designed and fielded among lesbians and gays, I find that lesbians and gay people come from much more liberal backgrounds than do straight people. So, their parents tend to be much more educated, they tend to be raised in less religiously fundamentalist homes and they’re raised in more accepting regions of the country than straight people.

So, if you think that sexual orientation is kind of randomly assigned to all of us, only a portion of those people who have sort of the interior trait of homosexuality end up saying that they’re gay, and I argue that that decision depends on the sort of affirmation of the background in which you were raised, and if you have more educated parents, less religiously fundamentalist parents or a more favorable region of upbringing, you’re more likely to respond to this interior trait by saying, “Actually, I’m gay.”

And there’s another piece of the puzzle, which is that the coming out process for lesbians and gays is sort of a conversion experience, politically.

Both the evidence that we see in surveys and also the kind of circumstantial evidence we see from self-reported political attitudes and behavior, indicate that the process of coming out itself is associated with the acquisition of liberal views on a whole bunch of issues. And this happens whether or not you have much contact with gay people. So, for example, one thing I find is that regardless of the prevalence of gay people in your neighborhood, you are just as likely to be liberal if you are gay in Greenwich Village as if you’re gay in Peoria.

There’s no relationship between the density of the gay population in your immediate area and your political views, [which] leads me to say that it doesn’t matter if you have lots of contact with other gay people. If you’re still adopting … liberal views, this suggests you don’t need contact in order to do that.

The big conclusion here is that the choice to identify as gay or lesbian or bi-sexual in response to an interior trait, an internal trait, is itself associated with these distinctive political views, in a way that doesn’t require contact or association with other gay people. I can think of no other demographic group in the U.S. that actually has that same sort of story about political views.

MP: So what led you to study this, or to create a survey and investigate this?

PE: There isn’t much survey data about gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Generally, typical surveys of politics don’t ask respondents of their sexual orientation, and there’s just a big gap in our understanding of how a small minority of the population becomes so unusually liberal and democratic, and it’s particularly interesting now, as gay and lesbian issues have much more salience in American politics than they did even twenty years ago.

So it’s interesting both in and of itself - like if you’re interested in gay rights - but it’s also interesting in a broader sense of trying to figure out how anyone acquires political views.

Additional reporting by Mara Revkin

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