In the first study to look at the consequences of anti-gay prejudice for mortality, researchers found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals who lived in communities with high levels of anti-gay prejudice have a shorter life expectancy of 12 years on average compared with their peers in the least prejudiced communities.
“The results of this study suggest a broadening of the consequences of prejudice to include premature death,” notes lead author Mark Hatzenbuehler, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The study is online in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
“Our findings indicate that sexual minorities living in communities with higher levels of prejudice die sooner than sexual minorities living in low-prejudice communities, and that these effects are independent of established risk factors for mortality, including household income, education, gender, ethnicity, and age, as well as the average income and education level of residents in the communities where the respondents lived,” says Hatzenbuehler.
“In fact, our results for prejudice were comparable to life expectancy differences that have been observed between individuals with and without a high school education.”
DEATH RATES
In order to examine the relationship between prejudice and mortality, the researchers constructed a measure capturing the average level of anti-gay prejudice in the communities where LGB individuals lived, beginning in 1988, using data on prejudicial attitudes from the General Social Survey, one of the primary sources of social indicator data in the social sciences.