Studying the Gay Stereotypes

OKCupid conducted a great study last year that I kept forgetting to make a post about. They wanted to test if some of the stereotypes hold water about the GLBT community or if they're just that- stereotypes.

The took data samples from the their 3.2 million users and crunched the numbers some of what they found was surprising, some was not so surprising.

The first thing they tested was the myth that gay guys are chasing after straight guys and are absolutely obsessed with them.

"We combed through over 4 million match searches, and found virtually no evidence of it:

Match Search Returns

• only 0.6% of gay men have ever searched for straight matches.
• only 0.1% of lesbians have ever searched for straight matches.
• only 0.13% of straight people's profile visitors are gay."

Despite what you read on forums, blogs and especially Craigslist gay guys aren't after straight guys. (I'm not going to get in the whole straight acting debate as that's a whole other post and a pandora's box.)

Then they tested out if gay men are more promiscuous than straight men. There's a lot of people who believe just because people are gay means they hookup more than polar opposite sexualities. Here's what OK Cupid found after combing through 4 million profiles where users reported the number of sex partners:

Median Reported Sex Partners

• straight men: 6
• gay men: 6
• straight women: 6
• gay women: 6

Even though the medians are all suspiciously 6 I believe gay men aren't any more promiscuous than straights. Humans- gay or straight- who are sexually active are going to have numerous sex partners. But the majority of people (gay or straight) are not going to be indiscriminately having sex with just anybody else. Being sexually active and being promiscuous are two different things.

Here's a graph of the above data:

Here's some surprising and interesting data. OK Cupid looked at same sex experience and attraction in self identified straight people to double check for bisexual/ curious leanings. Here's what they found for men: "As for straight men, a surprisingly high 13% have had a same-sex experience, and another 5% haven't yet but would like to."  

13% may not seem high but there are hundreds of millions of men in this nation (around 150 million currenlty) and when you take 13% of them you get nearly 20 million. That's a huge number- almost the size of the NYC metro population in fact.

As for women, well the graph speaks for itself:

Then, they looked at some really interesting data- where are all these curious guys in the country? They took the location in the profiles from these guys and gals and created a curious heat map of the US and Canada and here's what they found:

The geography of the bisexual/ curious guys is very interesting and surprising. First of all Canada is where they all are apparently but look at the Northwest. Washington state is the most curious/ bi state in America and it's not just because of all the open minded younger people in Seattle either- they're all over the state. And finally the Northeast which is not that surprising.

What is even more interesting is looking at the metro areas. San Francisco is obvious but the other cities aren't what you'd think. Madison, St.Louis, Austin, Phoenix, Las Vegas (what happens in Vegas really does stay in Vegas), Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Columbus and Minneapolis. A large group of the cities are in the Midwest and plain states. 

You'd think New York and Miami would be bright red but apparently not according to the findings of the team at OK Cupid. It's interesting to think why this is. Possible because there's a large out GLBT population in New York and other major gay meccas so it's easier to be out and have outlets to explore your curiosity/ bisexuality. Maybe it's the presence of colleges there, a lot of curious/bi guys in college and the number of open minded guys on college campuses is increasing.

Interesting data nonetheless.

Despite what the south reported I'm sure there's more repressed curiosity going on down there than they're letting on, especially in Mississippi and Alabama.