Gay Men Are Voting More for Anti-LGBTI Right-wing Policitians
A gay historian has revealed that in major western countries, gay men were more likely to vote for right-wing parties.
Samuel Huneke of Stanford University looked at voting data from 14 elections in five western countries US, UK, France, Germany and Brazil.
He found that in the US, LGBTI people overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party. But gay men were more likely than the general electorate to support conservative or far-right party in other western countries.
‘LGBT voters in other [non-U.S.] countries were less likely to support the conservative (or in some cases far-right) party by an average of only seven percent,’ Huneke wrote in the LA Review of Books.
‘And when you look only at gay men, the results are even more striking. In other countries, gay men were, on average, more likely than the general electorate to support the conservative or far-right party.’
In 2018 US midterm elections, 82% of voters who identified as LGBTI voted for the Democratic Party.
But ‘in virtually no other country have LGBT groups and leftist parties forged such a durable or fruitful alliance’.
‘In many other Western countries, right-wing and virulently homophobic parties enjoy considerable support among gay voters,’ Huneke wrote.
For example in Brazil, 29% of LGBTI voters cast their vote for notoriously homophobic candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He would go on to win the election and strip LGBTI rights on his first day in office.
In France a 2015 poll showed 26% of gay and bisexual male voters supported the anti-gay, conservative Marine Le Pen. Whereas only 16% of straight voters supported her. The poll also showed that, 38% of gay male couples voted for Le Pen’s party, the far-right National Front. But only 29% of straight couples did the same.
Gay men throw those with less status under the bus
Huneke argued that gay men voting more for conservative parties ‘makes a certain degree of sense’.
‘As Michael Segalov wrote in The Independent in 2017. Gay men have begun to “throw those with less status under the bus to cling onto their new found privilege”,’ Huneke wrote.
‘Endowed with the right to marry and no longer encumbered by sodomy laws or employment blacklists, gay men have begun to vote more like men, full stop.
‘Lesbians and trans individuals, who still face considerable prejudice and even legal barriers, have more to gain by supporting left-wing parties and more to lose should the right triumph.’