The personal is no longer political: the depoliticisation of sexual identity and individualistic narratives among right-wing LGB+ individuals

The current study answers a need to provide information about bisexual as differentiated from gay/lesbian individuals and to increase understanding of the sexual minority stress experienced by bisexual individuals. Men and women who identified themselves as either bisexual or exclusively Lesbian/Gay (LG) were recruited nationwide and completed questionnaire measures of stressors associated with sexual orientation, openness about sexual orientation, conflict about sexual orientation, and depressive symptoms. Bisexual participants were younger and more likely to be female compared to LG participants. Bisexuals reported more conflict regarding their sexual orientation, were less open about their sexual orientation, and reported less minority stress associated with violence and discrimination. There were no differences in depressive symptoms for bisexual vs. LG participants. Bisexuals who were more open reported more conflict about their sexual orientation. Bisexuals who reported more stress associated with v...

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the exceptional situation that has been experienced on a global scale since 2020, it is essential to assess the impact of COVID-19 in several areas and domains. Therefore, this research seeks to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on work-related quality of life (WRQoL) in a Portuguese-speaking sample, through the lens of sexual orientation. One thousand, five hundred and seventy-seven individuals participated in this study, of which 1396 (88.5%) self-identified as heterosexual, 95 (6.0%) as gay or lesbian, and 87 (5.5%) as bisexual. Participants responded to the “Work-Related Quality of Life” scale, the “Fear of COVID-19” scale, and the “Negative Impact of COVID-19” scale. Bisexuals scored higher on “Fear of COVID-19” and “Negative Impact of COVID-19” than heterosexual, and gay, or lesbian participants. Differences between sexual orientations for all dimensions of WRQoL were found: heterosexual participants scored higher on general well-being, home–work interface, career satisfaction, working conditions, and lower on stress at work, compared to bisexual, and gay, or lesbian participants. Gay or lesbian participants scored lower than heterosexual and bisexual participants on career satisfaction and working conditions. Sexual orientation, the fear of COVID-19, and the negative impact of COVID-19 were significant predictors of overall WRQoL (explaining 13% of variance). Moderation analysis also showed that sexual orientation is a significant moderator of the association between the fear of COVID-19, the negative impact of COVID-19, and WRQoL. LGB people (especially bisexuals) suffer more severe impacts of COVID-19 and have lower WRQoL than heterosexual people. Inevitably, this has consequences in terms of mental health and overall quality of life for sexual minorities, thus reinforcing the need to adopt inclusive policies in organizations and companies to improve their WRQoL.

Writing on the experiences of bisexual-identified people has highlighted the potential complexity of the ongoing process of deciding when and how to present one's sexual orientation identity to others (Rust, 2002). The two studies presented here were designed to contribute basic knowledge regarding self-presentation of sexual orientation among bisexual people. In Study 1, bisexual participants (N=147) were less likely than their lesbian and gay (LG) peers (N=191) to present their actual orientation to others, and more likely to present themselves as having a sexual orientation different from their actual orientation. These sexual orientation differences were explained by gender of romantic partner and uncertainty about one's sexual orientation. Sexual orientation differences also emerged in links between self-presentation and outness level. For example, bisexual participants who presented themselves as LG had relatively high everyday outness levels; in contrast, LG participants who presented themselves as bisexual had relatively low everyday outness levels. In Study 2, 240 bisexual women and men indicated their levels of outness as a sexual minority person (potentially including identification as gay, lesbian, queer) and specifically as bisexual. Outness was higher with respect to status as a sexual minority compared to status as bisexual; the magnitude of this difference was predicted by gender of romantic partner and uncertainty about one's sexual orientation. Moreover, even controlling for outness as a sexual minority person, well-being was predicted by outness as bisexual to family members.

Extensive evidence documents health disparities for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) women, including worse physical, mental, and behavioral health than heterosexual women. These factors have been linked to premature mortality, yet few studies have investigated premature mortality disparities among LGB women and whether they differ by lesbian or bisexual identity. To examine differences in mortality by sexual orientation. This prospective cohort study examined differences in time to mortality across sexual orientation, adjusting for birth cohort. Participants were female nurses born between 1945 and 1964, initially recruited in the US in 1989 for the Nurses' Health Study II, and followed up through April 2022. Sexual orientation (lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual) assessed in 1995. Time to all-cause mortality from assessment of exposure analyzed using accelerated failure time models. Among 116 149 eligible participants, 90 833 (78%) had valid sexual orientation data. Of these 90 833 participants, 89 821 (98.9%) identified as heterosexual, 694 (0.8%) identified as lesbian, and 318 (0.4%) identified as bisexual. Of the 4227 deaths reported, the majority were among heterosexual participants (n = 4146; cumulative mortality of 4.6%), followed by lesbian participants (n = 49; cumulative mortality of 7.0%) and bisexual participants (n = 32; cumulative mortality of 10.1%). Compared with heterosexual participants, LGB participants had earlier mortality (adjusted acceleration factor, 0.74 [95% CI, 0.64-0.84]). These differences were greatest among bisexual participants (adjusted acceleration factor, 0.63 [95% CI, 0.51-0.78]) followed by lesbian participants (adjusted acceleration factor, 0.80 [95% CI, 0.68-0.95]). In an otherwise largely homogeneous sample of female nurses, participants identifying as lesbian or bisexual had markedly earlier mortality during the study period compared with heterosexual women. These differences in mortality timing highlight the urgency of addressing modifiable risks and upstream social forces that propagate and perpetuate disparities.

Parties and their elites play an important role in shaping public opinion towards European integration. As determinants of party support for European integration, the literature has identified ideological and strategic electoral motives. In this article, we examine the impact of economic factors on party support for European integration. We find that party support from right-wing parties is larger in countries with greater financial benefits from the EU budget. On the contrary, benefits from trade creation by the introduction of the euro as a common currency show no significant influence on party support. In the period after the introduction of the euro, we find that right-wing parties were much more Euro-sceptical than left-wing parties when their country did not fulfil the Maastricht debt or deficit criteria. We also observe more support for European integration by left-wing parties in countries that would benefit from welfare state convergence due to European integration. While our analysis indicates that different economic factors always have been important to explain party support for European integration, we also find that, in the period after the financial crisis in 2008, these motives have gained importance at the expense of the ideological motives.

The article explores the evolution of left-wing voting in the postcommunist countries of Central and Eastern Europe against the background of value shifts. The main trend indicates that those societies are witnessing a gradual transition to postmaterialism. However, examining the parties’ electoral manifestos allowed the authors to conclude that the twenty-first century cannot be characterized by uniform trends: only in the case of environmentalism did the left-wing parties adapt to the changing values of their electorate, while for other indicators the situation was the opposite. The main argument of the study, supported by regression analysis is that only the appeal to green policies prevented the left-wing parties from losing out in electoral campaigns, while the references to multiculturalism and social equality had the opposite effect. Curiously enough, the verbal commitment to traditionalist values also helped the left-wingers to retain their electorate. To get a more complete picture of the voting patterns, the authors carried out an investigation into the left-wing electorate. The conclusion was that supporters of the left-wing parties are increasingly inclined toward postmaterialism. At the same time, the study showed the ineffectiveness of the left-wing political programs. This creates a gap between the left-wing parties and their electorate.

From the late 20th and into the early 21st centuries, scholars in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics have produced a substantial body of literature that explores and explains the political attitudes and behavior of sexual and gender minorities. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is reflected in the broad range of approaches and theories that attempt to explain political phenomena among LGBTQ people. The majority of the literature reveals sexual minorities to be politically distinct from heterosexuals, in that sexual minorities are more ideologically liberal and, in the United States, more likely to support Democratic partisans. Largely because of heterosexism, sexual and gender minorities are also more likely to participate in political activities that directly implicate their sexual orientation or gender identity, such as volunteering with LGBTQ interest groups or attending “Pride” events, although sexual orientation and gender identity are significant predictors of a variety of attitudes and behavior. Recent research has demonstrated that LGBTQ people also participate in politics by running for office, mounting legal challenges to discriminatory laws or government actions, and collectively organizing locally, nationally, and internationally. Explanations for LGBTQ political distinctiveness have concentrated in three broad areas: selection, embeddedness, and conversion theories. While studies have provided supportive evidence for each hypothesis, the field has also increasingly turned to intersectional evaluations that admonish researchers to interrogate intragroup LGBTQ behavioral and attitudinal heterogeneity more fully. The infusion of intersectional theory into LGBTQ political research has revealed attitudinal and behavioral distinctions among sexual and gender minorities centered on axes of race and ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, and income, among others. The critical importance of disentangling the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity, the recognition of cross-cutting structures of oppression such as homophobia, sexism, and racism, and the emergence of subfields of LGBTQ political behavior are indicative of a burgeoning field of study. Looking to the future of LGBTQ political research, the political successes of the LGBTQ movement and evolving conceptions of sexual and gender identity have necessitated a reevaluation of LGBTQ political behavior in the 21st century. The continued diffusion of same-sex marriage, the electoral capture of LGBTQ voters, and the destabilization of identity categories that has been demanded by queer theory all pose unique challenges to the future of LGBTQ politics and political mobilization around the globe.

Navigating Remarkable Communication Experiences of Sexual Minorities

Diversity and representation within the literature on sexual dysfunction in multiple sclerosis: A systematic review

LGBTQ cultural competence for pharmacists

Suspicious success – Cheating, inequality acceptance, and political preferences

Supporters of left-wing parties typically put more emphasis on redistributive policies than right-wing voters. I investigate whether this difference in tolerating inequality is amplified by suspicious success — achievements that might arise from cheating. Using a laboratory experiment, I exogenously vary cheating opportunities for stakeholders who work on a real effort task and earn money according to their self-reported performances. An impartial spectator is able to redistribute the earnings between the stakeholders, albeit it is not possible to detect cheating. I find that the opportunity to cheat leads to different views on whether to accept inequality. Left-wing spectators substantially reduce inequality when cheating is possible, while the treatment has no significant effect on choices of right-wing spectators. Since neither differences in beliefs nor differences in norms about cheating can explain this finding, it seems to be driven by a difference in preferences. These results suggest that redistributive preferences will diverge even more once public awareness increases that inequality might be to a certain extent created by cheating.

Does the electoral defeat of a far-right party abroad influence support for similar parties at home? In this paper we posit, and test, the theoretical argument that signals of viability and popularity akin to bandwagon and titanic effects operate beyond the confines of national boundaries to cause voters to update domestic preferences based on comparable party performance abroad. By exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of Donald Trump's 2020 electoral defeat with the Spanish sociological study's monthly barometer data collection, we provide robust causal evidence to show that Trump's electoral loss in the US had a negative contagious spillover effect on self-reported support for the Spanish far-right. Empirically we estimate intent-to-treat effects based on the as good as random exposure to the electoral results to isolate the impact of Trump's defeat on the voting intentions for Spain's new far-right party, VOX. Our results - which are robust to various modelling approaches including covariate adjustment, regional fixed effects, placebo issues, and nearest-neighbour matching - demonstrate that Trump's defeat to Joe Biden had a sizeable negative effect on expressed support for VOX. The contagion effect is substantive: equal to 3 to 6 percentage-points among the general population and 11 percentage-points among former right-wing voters. Our findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on electoral behaviour as they indicate that the electoral success of ideologically symmetrical parties abroad can play a role in understanding a party's domestic success by serving as an important information signal of these parties' electoral viability.

Culturally competent mental health care

ABSTRACTThis study investigates interactions between sexual orientation, race, and gender on a measure of psychological distress. There is a known association between sexual orientation minority identity and worse mental health outcomes. There are reasons to believe, however, that this association could vary by race and gender. Prior research considering such moderating effects has been sparse and typically employed small-scale convenience sampling. Using data from the 2013–2015 National Health Interview Survey, this study investigates differences in psychological distress scores between heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and bisexual participants across gender and racial categories. The results indicate a significant three-way interaction between sexual orientation, race, and gender. Specifically, the association between psychological distress and being a gay male is significantly larger for racial minority men than for White men. Although gay and lesbian women have significantly more psychological distress than heterosexual women, this gap is similar for White and racial minority women. Further analyses suggest that the moderating effect found among men is driven primarily by the higher psychological distress scores among Black and Hispanic gay men. Limitations, implications, and future directions are discussed.