More Women = More LGBT Candidates?

A few weeks back Sharon wrote the following question on the board:

"Will the focus on appearance such as hair, clothes, etc. become less significant & less of an focus for the press as more lesbians run for office?"

I think the majority of us agreed that a person's sexual orientation would not change the way the media treated them - but then Sharon brought up the case of Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin. I knew that I could not recall any coverage of Tammy Baldwin's appearance -- but thought I would check it out in some detail. Now I know this is not entirely scientific - but on an anecdotal level, it was pretty interesting.

First I decided to do a few Google searches: "Tammy Baldwin is wearing", "Tammy Baldwin appearance", "Tammy Baldwin clothes" and a few other iterations... I came up with no coverage relevant to her appearance. I opened it up and searched "Tammy Baldwin lesbian" but found not a single obvious reference to her appearance at all. I decided to take it a little more academic and pooled together some terms in with her name in LexisNexis searching for the past five years -- I found no article that mentioned her appearance in a positive, negative, sexual or any way. Granted -- my research methods for this were not incredibly sound, but I spent over an hour looking through articles and couldn't find a thing. On the one hand, I found this sort of heartening -- she was being examined for her standing not her appearance. But how interesting to think that the press has really spent so much time attacking other female figures for not looking feminine enough or looking like a lesbian, and then when we actually have a lesbian in an elected office the press won't touch her appearance.

I think some of this may be a function of the fact that despite the gains in openly LGBT candidates and elected officials, they still represent a small percentage of the current governing body -- far smaller than even women, and so therefore the press does not have a uniform means of covering them. This got me thinking about a few other things as well -- since more and more people who were minorities in elected office are making gains -- when one group makes more gains, does that mean that other groups will as well? Or, phrased another way, does more women in office mean more LGBT candidates too?

In the picture posted at the top of the post which I got from the Rutgers Center for American Women in Politics (http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/) you see states ranked by color for the amount of women they have in their state legislatures.

In addition to this I found a site that has all of the Out officials listed by state:
http://www.glli.org/out_officials

By clicking through all of the states here you can see that on the whole it appears as though states that have more women in office have more openly LGBT candidates. Now I am not saying that this is concrete evidence or anything -- but I think it is interesting to look at some of these trends. I wonder if as women really do make more gains, if more LGBT candidates will make it into office and then if after that appearance will not be as much of an issue. Again, not the most scientifically supported claim, but an interesting thing to look at nonetheless.