Even though it may be challenging to determine both someone’s sexual
orientation and the time of their coming out, or sometimes even their
gender for that matter, taking all those as the starting point for
analyzing the proliferation of out LGBT parliamentarians will offer
intriguing insights into a country’s political life. When following over
some 40 years the developments in two European countries with a
multi-party system, but with different proportional representation
voting systems, such as Germany and Finland, one can notice interesting
differences begging for closer scrutiny. In Germany, the list voting
combined with constituency voting has allowed openly lesbian or gay
candidates from all parties to enter the Bundestag, whereas in Finland
only candidates from younger parties have made it to the eduskunta
through the open list system. In both countries, gay men have been able
to benefit comfortably from their incumbency advantage, whereas lesbians
have faced far more difficulties in sustaining their political careers.
Thus the descriptive representation and political careers of out
lesbians and gays present themselves as highly gendered. This can be
explained partly by the prejudices held by party selectorates, and
partly by the gendered differences in symbolic representation of
politicians in the media, which affects the electorate. It remains to be
seen what effect the changing political meaning of politicians’ coming
out will have in relation to substantial representation in an era when
being lesbian or gay becomes ordinary, but, at the same time, LGBT
issues get politicized and remain contested.