Neither An In-Law Nor An Outlaw Be: Trends in Americans’ Attitudes Toward Gay People

Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." In the wake of the 2004 presidential election, it looked as if the gay and lesbian movement—which had been enjoying a string of unprecedented successes—had suddenly fallen terribly out of fashion.

American gays and lesbians began the twenty-first century in the largely fawning spotlight of popular TV shows like Will and Grace, which centers on the relationship between a gay man and the straight woman who is his best friend, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which a team of gay experts on fashion, culture, and interior design each week "makes over" the life of a different couth-challenged heterosexual male. In 2003, gay people celebrated a historic legal victory overturning sodomy laws at the U.S. Supreme Court, and a year later they won the right to wed one another legally in Massachusetts. But on November 2, 2004, no fewer than eleven states—ranging from traditional Utah to more liberal Oregon—overwhelmingly passed referenda adopting state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. (Two additional states—Louisiana and Missouri—enacted similar amendments earlier in the year.)

And as a series of largely inaccurate stories were published indicating that "moral values" had played an unexpectedly large role in turning voters out to reelect George W. Bush, much of the blame for the defeat of John F. Kerry and the Democrats was heaped upon LGBT people. Straight Americans, who had once appeared perfectly comfortable with (or at least titillated about) the idea of gay people peeking into their hall closets and underwear drawers, were now shooing them out the door as if they were houseguests who had overstayed their welcome.

Are these most recent events the dawn of a new era—or merely a terribly ugly fashion of the political moment? While only time will tell for sure, here we explore this question by documenting trends in Americans' attitudes regarding their feelings toward gay people and gay and lesbian issues—including their feelings about the morality of homosexual sex and gay relationships, their opinions on various policies affecting the status of gays, and some of the political ramifications of these attitudes.

While Americans' warmth toward gay people has increased since surveys began regularly seeking attitudes toward them in the early 1980s, a striking fact remains true even in 2004: Many Americans dislike gay people, and they aren't reluctant to say so to survey researchers. As we shall see, any efforts by the gay rights movement to promote policies favorable to gay people are handicapped by this deep-seated antipathy, which is shared (to varying degrees) by Americans of all races, backgrounds, and ages.

The "feeling thermometer," on which survey respondents are asked to locate their feelings toward a group of people on a scale ranging from zero for the coldest possible feelings to one hundred for the warmest, is a standard measure of affect. The National Election Studies, conducted by the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, used the feeling thermometer on eight occasions between 1984 and 2002 to measure the distribution of Americans' feelings toward gay men and lesbians, among other groups.

We calculate the public's affect toward gay people first in terms of the mean feeling-thermometer score given to gays and lesbians by respondents. The mean score gives us a sense of exactly how warm or cold feelings are toward a group. These data tell us that between 1984 and 2002, the American public moved from feelings that best can be described as icy (a mean score of 30) to a temperature just a shade below neutral (46).

(Click for larger view of Figure 1a-1b.)

A second measure is the proportion of respondents who assigned gays and lesbians the lowest score of all the social groups included in that year's survey (which average about twenty per year).

This measure gives us a better sense of the place of gay people with reference to other social groups, allowing us to determine the extent to which those who do not dislike lesbians and gay men still like gay people less than anyone else. In 1984, a majority of Americans—including a majority of virtually every demographic group—ranked gay men and lesbians last among groups included in the study. (This was no mean feat; on average, respondents rated twenty-three different groups on the feeling thermometer that year.) By 2002, in only one major demographic group—African Americans—did a majority rate gay people last on the feeling thermometer.

African Americans are distinctive as the only group to have shown no significant increase in warmth toward gays and lesbians during this time period. "Blacks' current attitudes" toward gays are all the more interesting because they represent a dramatic reversal of their pattern of increasing warmth toward gay people, beginning at 36 in 1984 (warmer feelings than those of all other groups with the exception of those with college degrees), reaching a peak in 1998 with a mean score of 50, and followed by mean scores of 42 in 2000 and 38 in 2002—lower than any other group in that year. We can only conjecture about this reversal, and leave the explanation for it to future research.

How do these figures help us answer whether we are witnessing the "end of an era" of gay rights? We believe that LGBT people can take particular heart from the age cohort data: Americans of all ages are becoming more—not less—tolerant as they grow older. And older, colder, Americans are being replaced by citizens who express more warmth for gay people. But gays and lesbians have two reasons to be nervous: One is blacks' lukewarm feelings toward gay people (which would appear to present an opportunity to drive a wedge into the Democratic civil rights coalition); the other is a slight cooling trend toward gays that appeared across all demographic groups between 2000 and 2002.