OutRight

Polling the People
by Dale Carpenter

What does America think about gays and gay issues? What do we think ourselves?

A new survey sponsored by the non-partisan Gill Foundation reinforces some common ideas about the gay civil rights movement and suggests new directions for organizational emphasis. It also leaves much room for further study.

First, however, a cautionary word is needed about the survey’s methodology. It relied in part on a new polling technique known as "online interactive research." This technique allows respondents to answer questions in a survey online, rather than on the telephone or in face-to-face interviews. In theory, this approach better secures the privacy of respondents, encouraging them to be more honest than they might be in a personal polling interview. In polls related to sexual orientation, the need for such discretion is especially keen.

But the online polling method also has drawbacks. Study respondents tend to be disproportionately male and young. Gay males outnumbered females two-to-one in the survey, as they do in most surveys of gays. Racial minorities identified as gay were slightly over-represented in comparison to their numbers in the general population. There are statistical ways to minimize this skewing of the sample, and the survey attempts to do so. But even these techniques are inadequate when we have no sure-fire way of knowing what would comprise an appropriate sample of a sexual minority like gays.

Those qualifications noted, the survey offers some interesting insights into gay opinion. Alas, there is not much good news for gay conservatives. A healthy plurality of gays (43 percent) consider themselves politically "moderate." But the next largest group is self-described "liberals" (36 percent), followed by "conservatives" (11 percent). Compare those numbers to the figures for the general population, which is 40 percent moderate, 35 percent conservative, and only 19 percent liberal.

It could be that the self-described "moderate" category actually includes many people with conservative policy preferences who refuse to call themselves "conservative" because they associate the word with people like Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). It would be useful for future poll-takers to measure gays’ political self-identification against their actual positions on taxes, defense policy, capital punishment, and the like. Then we’ll know how conservative gays really are.

On specific gay issues, there is some encouragement for those who emphasize the importance of same-sex marriage. On a ranking of issues "most important" to the gay community, legal recognition of same-sex relationships finished first, with 35 percent. Laws prohibiting employment discrimination placed second on the list, with 27 percent. Hate crimes laws finished third at 22 percent. Gays in the military finished dead last (tied with gay adoptions), with only eight percent of respondents considering it the top priority. These findings may suggest a need for gay organizations to re-order their priorities, putting more emphasis on legal recognition of gay relationships and less on hate crimes laws.

It would be helpful, however, for a future survey to ask how gays rank these priorities, not just which priority is the highest. It would also be useful to measure disagreement among gays on some "gay" issues, especially hate crimes laws, on which there has been considerable intra-community debate.

Perhaps more interesting is the survey’s findings on the attitudes of the general population. First, the good news: A full 91 percent of Americans now say they know someone gay. The continual exhortation to individuals to come out of the closet appears to have worked. It’s unimaginable that a pre-Stonewall survey would have found such a high number of Americans familiar with gays. Of "familiar voters"–those who know an openly gay person–36 percent know a gay co-worker, 26 percent know a close personal friend who is gay, and 21 percent know a gay family member.

The survey also reinforces the common view that coming out powerfully affects the attitudes of the people around you. "Familiar voters" are more likely than non-familiar voters to support hate crimes legislation protecting gays (82 percent familiar vs. 74 percent non-familiar), employment discrimination laws protecting gays (74 percent vs. 58 percent), allowing gays to serve openly in the military (64 percent vs. 46 percent), legal recognition of same-sex civil unions (47 percent vs. 22 percent), and adoptions by gay parents (47 percent vs. 19 percent). Unfortunately, the survey did not ask respondents’ views on sodomy laws, which still exist in 18 states.

"Familiar voters" are also more likely to consider gay issues "important" in their voting decisions. They are correspondingly less likely to support a candidate who expresses negative views about gays.

Here’s the bad news. If so many Americans say they know a gay person, and if coming out has such high impact, why does prejudice persist? Has the coming-out strategy reached the limits of its effectiveness? What do we do now?

The answers are surely complicated. For example, the survey concludes gays are more likely to be open about their sexual orientation with friends and even co-workers than with family members. It would be useful to know whether pro-gay policy preferences correlate with the degree to which someone knows some gay person. Are people who know an openly gay family member more supportive than those who know only an openly gay friend or an openly gay co-worker? If so, it matters not just that we come out, but to whom.

The answer to that question, too, awaits a future study. But the Gill Foundation has made a good start helping us understand ourselves and the people around us.