Fundamentals of Public Communication Campaigns

CHAPTER 11 Public Communication Campaigns for LGBTQ+ Communities

The issue of fundamental rights for LGBTQ+ individuals has been addressed through a myriad of public communication campaigns across the world. Campaigns emphasize that sexual rights form an essential component of human rights and should be the intrinsic rights of all human beings. LGBTQ+ is an acronym that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and others. Developed in the 1990s, the term is a variation of the acronym LGB, which gradually replaced the term “gay” when alluding to the broader LGBT community in the mid- to late 1980s. The acronym, in addition to its common variants, operates as an umbrella concept for sexuality and gender identity.¹ People generally employ LGBTQ+ to refer to all the communities contained within “LGBTTTQQIAA” (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirited, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, and ally). LGBTQ+ is the more frequently employed term in the community, arguably because it comes across as more user-friendly.²

In February 2021, a Gallup poll on lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender identification revealed that 5.6% of American adults identified as LGBTQ+. This represented an increase from the previous 4.5% in Gallup’s poll conducted in 2017. Almost 87% of Americans claimed to be heterosexual or straight, and 7.6% chose not to answer the question about their sexual orientation. Over 50% of LGBTQ+ adults (54.6%) said that they were bisexual. ...