Please join the American Politics workshop as they host Patrick J. Egan, Professor of Politics and Public Policy at New York University, for a presentation titled, "From the Closet to the Revolving Door: The Changing Nature of LGBTQ+ Identities."
The landscape of LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and more) rights is evolving at a dizzying pace in the U.S., with our times marked by both tremendous advances as well as backlash in laws, policies, and public attitudes. Using both original and publicly available representative sample survey data, I document how these changes have been accompanied by shifts in the nature of LGBTQ+ identities themselves. LGBTQ+ people have exploded as shares of the US population. Much of this identity growth is taking place among people who (1) do not bear traditional markers of sexual or gender minority status; (2) are inconsistent in their identification over time; and (3) adopt identities in part as a reflection of their politics, rather than the other way around. "Coming out of the closet" has long been the dominant metaphor for claiming LGBTQ+ identities. But now a "revolving door" model--where these identities emerge and recede in different life stages and social contexts at an individual’s discretion--may be more apt for many. This shift holds both promise and peril for the LGBTQ+ movement, which relies heavily on support from those who believe that sexual and gender identities are fixed and ascribed, rather than elected and chosen.
Patrick J. Egan, Professor of Politics and Public Policy at NYU, specializes in U.S. political attitudes and behavior, and their consequences for public policy, partisanship and identity. He is author of Partisan Priorities: How Issue Ownership Drives and Distorts American Politics (Cambridge University Press), and his peer-reviewed research has appeared in journals including Nature, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science. Egan is a recipient of the NYU Golden Dozen Award in recognition for outstanding contributions to learning in the classroom, and he served on the committee of faculty and administrators that created the undergraduate Public Policy major offered jointly by Wagner and NYU’s College of Arts and Science.
Egan holds a Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley, a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton, and a BA from Swarthmore College. Before entering academia, he served as an Assistant Deputy Mayor of Policy and Planning in the office of Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell. He covers presidential elections and primaries for NBC News as an elections analyst with the network's Exit Poll Desk team.