Ken Cimino: Written for Lambda Book Review, Advocate.com, GFN, INT Media, Yahoo FinanceVision and CBS MarketWatch.
This book was an analysis of “group consciousness” of the conservative lesbian, gays, bisexuals and transgender (LGBT) community. The study employed both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and examined the utility of “group consciousness” (building on group theory) as an explanatory construct for the understanding of political identity among conservative LGBT. Group theory, as developed from the works of Bentley (1908) and Truman (1951), stated that individuals join groups because they enjoy the interaction of people with similar interest and are motivated by a problem or disturbing event.
Data was gathered from two sources. First, the study contacted both local Log Cabin Republicans and StoneWall Democrats political groups in several cities and requested to speak the presidents of the local chapters. The study interviewed around 15 Log Cabin Republican members and 15 StoneWall Democrat members throughout the United States. The samples were gathered from face to face, email and over the telephone interviews of members of both conservative and liberal LGBT political groups. Overall, I theorized that most conservative LGBTs believe the role of sexual identity should be limited. Hence, from these interviews I found several variables to study to back up my hypothesis.
Next, data was gathered from a post election online survey of 1,146 LGBT conducted for the Gill Foundation from November 30 to December 5, 2000. Overall, eleven percent self identified with conservative political philosophies. And another thirty- six percent self identified with liberal political philosophies. Specifically, this study centered on conservative LGBT’s within in the LGBT community. However, the study utilized the liberal LGBT’s data for comparison purposes. Therefore, how does one expect these factors to influence political identification or vote choices? In other words, why don’t gay conservatives use sexual identity as the main group identification?
In summary, conservative LGBTs appeared to focus on economic or other characteristics to determine political choices. Therefore, it seemed liberal LGBT’s take sexual identity into consideration when making political choices, but conservative LGBTs do not.
Thus, I determined that economic interest did trump race, class, and ethnicity (sexual identity) interests for conservative LGBT’s. Finally, my research showed that economic, class and ethnicity issues were more important for some LGBTs members than for others.
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