Smoking at the Intersections of Race/Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation

Research has tended to document smoking disparities separately by race/ethnicity and sexual orientation, with relatively less work examining the intersections of both identities. As such, we draw on data from the 2010 Social Justice Sexuality Project to demonstrate how cigarette smoking disparities manifest across detailed intersections of race/ethnicity and sexual orientation among a sample of U.S. adults. Findings from logistic regression models that adjust for demographic, socioeconomic, and social support confounders across groups reveal that risk of current cigarette smoking tends to distribute multiplicatively across identity groups. For example, findings show that racial/ethnic minority adults do not have equally lower likelihood of current cigarette smoking compared to white adults among heterosexual adults. Furthermore, while sexual minority adults generally have a higher likelihood of current cigarette smoking relative to their heterosexual counterparts, their levels of risk are not uniformly shared but instead are critically shaped by race/ethnicity. Overall, results underscore the need to consider both within- and between-group differences in assessments of health inequities across identity categories.