Heterosexual Threat and Violent Anti-Gay Mobilization

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Participants, Allies, and Opponents: The Landscape of LGBTQ Movements

Abstract

This study examines the how the political opportunity structure moderates the role of threat on violent anti-LGBT movement mobilization. Since 2021 there has been a resurgence in anti-LGBT movement mobilization, with groups like Moms For Liberty mobilizing participants to protest against LGBT-inclusive policies. These groups can be understood as part of reactive movements, which mobilize participants to reassert established claims that they perceive as insecure. When communities that have enjoyed societal privileges feel that their advantages are threatened by political challengers, they participate in reactive movements to stall challengers’ advances and ossify existing power hierarchies.
The degree to which these reactive movements can engage in successful collective action varies considerably over time. Movements generally have a poor bargaining position relative to influential political actors. However, openings in the political opportunity structure provide movements with brief windows of access to the state, where movements can negotiate with and extract concessions from institutional actors. When the state is completely inaccessible to movements, extremist ideologies and violent tactics can develop among activists who feel the polity’s closed nature makes nonviolent mobilization inefficacious.
I want to test whether political threats to heterosexuals lead to violent anti-gay movement mobilization, and whether the effect of threat is moderated by state and county-level political context. I use a novel dataset from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) on anti-gay extremist acts that I have binarized into violent and non-violent actions to measure violent anti-gay mobilizations (my dependent variable) to test my hypotheses. I hope to demonstrate the conditions under which reactive political movements will resort to violence to advance their goals. Additionally, I hope to contribute to the literature on political process theory and threat by demonstrating that political alienation and reactionary backlash against sexual diversity can lead the anti-gay movement to embrace political violence.

Author

• Gavin Riley, Vanderbilt University