College Students, Sexualities Identities, and Participation in Political Marches

Student protest is often an engine of social change for sexual minorities and other oppressed groups. Through an analysis of college students in the Add Health survey (n = 2,534), we found that sexual minorities attend more political marches than heterosexuals. To understand why this sexuality difference occurs, we performed a logistic regression analysis to decipher the importance of four explanations: essentialism, selection, embeddedness, and conversion. We discovered that participation in political groups is the best explanation of the sexuality gap in activism, but racial attitudes were also important. Type of college major was generally connected to student activism, but educational attainment and disciplinary curriculums did not explain the increased activism of sexual minorities.