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Ally Development and Programming
Allies have been instrumental to many social movements, including those for LGBTQ rights. The term ally refers to individuals who engage in social change efforts in coalition with social groups to which they do not themselves belong. Allies may have more social power, status, or privilege than the group with whom they are allied. However, it is also possible for alliances to form across different marginalized social groups. Social change efforts can include working on one’s own internal biases and stereotypes (consciousness raising), interventions (both interpersonal and institutional) designed to raise awareness of the existence of different groups and their right to equal treatment, and actions intended to create broader communities of support for marginalized people, as well as activism to change policies and laws. This entry describes who LGBTQ allies are, how researchers have attempted to understand them, the development of ally identities and activism, and intervention programs designed to foster ally commitments. This research has taken place almost entirely in the United States; while some of the general points may translate to different contexts, others may not.
Allies and LGBTQ Communities
Given the diversity of LGBTQ communities, there are many possibilities for alliances between different identity groups. Because space does not permit an exhaustive overview of all allies in the LGBTQ context here, we will address those most studied in the social science literature.
Most often, the term LGBTQ ally is applied to heterosexual people engaged in social change for LGBTQ people. However, there is increasing interest in understanding cisgender allies to transgender people, and such allies can include cisgender people who are LGBQ or heterosexual. Further, there are periods in which alliances across other identity differences within LGBTQ communities have developed. For example, during the AIDS crisis, many lesbians were activists alongside gay men fighting for recognition of, and increased research on and treatments for, AIDS. Lesbians could be considered allies in this context as their personal stake may sometimes have been different from that of gay men, as was the degree to which AIDS directly affected their respective communities (of course, this also differed along lines of race). There are also alliances built across class and race differences that critique mainstream LGBTQ organizations’ narrow focus on marriage equality, as opposed to economic justice, or state-sanctioned regulation of sexuality. These latter two examples highlight the ways in which conceptualizing alliances can be difficult within the context of a “community” that includes diverse sexual and gender orientations, preferences, and identities, as well as race, class, age, and (dis)ability differences. This entry focuses on the better-understood development of heterosexual allies, with the acknowledgment that many of these processes may be similar in the development of other kinds of allies.
Methodological Overview of Research on Allies
Research on ally development has been based primarily on either school- (K–12) or college-aged individuals. Most nonstudent samples have included clinical practitioners, such as therapists and social workers. Further, the research on heterosexual allies (and the small body of work on cisgender allies) has been largely descriptive; there are relatively few survey-based studies. Therefore, current knowledge is based largely on first-person, or case-study, accounts of ally awareness and development, with a growing body of larger interview-based or survey studies. There are two broad ways in which one can understand the literature on how people become allies: (a) developmentally focused models, which examine ally identity as well as ally activism, and (b) research on the particular characteristics, motivations, attitudes, and experiences that predict ally social change behaviors, with less consideration of ally identity. Although the literature does not always make this distinction between identity and behavior, it is an important one, as discussed below.
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