THE MYTH OF GAY PROMISCUITY: Dale Carpenter

It is notoriously difficult to conduct reliable surveys on levels of promiscuity. There are huge problems of self-selection, self-identification, and self-revelation. There is also the question whether to use averages, which allow a few outliers to skew the numbers, or medians. So no numbers are very reliable.

A very keen observer and blogger, law professor Eugene Volokh, has taken a look at the surveys and studies and concluded that the differences between gays and straights in numbers of sexual partners is not very large. And it should be noted that these small differences in levels of promiscuity have occurred under a culture and legal system that gives scant incentive for gays to settle down into couples.

Based on Volokh's review, here is what he concluded in his blog entry for Thursday, May 22:



Now it does appear that a significant minority of American gay males do have lots of sexual partners. Moreover, the median American gay male does have somewhat more sexual partners than the median American straight male (likely 10-20 lifetime partners for gays as opposed to 5-10 for straights; my earlier post giving medians of 40 and 16 respectively, was mistaken, because it inadvertently reported averages rather than median).

But the claim that the median American gay male (not just a minority of gays) is hyper-promiscuous (not just a bit more promiscuous than heterosexuals) appears to be false -- and politically quite important. Claims that "Male homosexuals have . . ." or "Most male homosexuals have . . ." or "The median male homosexual has . . ." are much more politically effective at justifying different treatment for homosexuals than claims that "Some male homosexuals . . . ." Many voters are open to the idea of treating a whole group based on what most of its members do; fewer are open to treating the group based on what a minority of the group does. Also, statements about mild differences in median sexual partners aren't terribly striking, but claims that, say, the median gay man has over 250 sexual partners in a lifetime makes gays seem in a way freakish and deviant, and makes it much harder for people to see gay sexual relationships as emotionally comparable to straight sexual relationships. (I'm making a descriptive claim here about how people are likely to react to promiscuity, not a claim about how people should react to it.)

There are two reasons why I think the median gay male hyper-promiscuity claim is mythical.

1. The best data that I've seen -- data drawn from random samples of the population, the most reliable (albeit not perfectly reliable) polling mechanism -- shows that gay males do not have vastly more sexual partners than straight males. The study I reported on when I first blogged about this reported that gay and bisexual males (defined as having had at least one same-sex relationship in the last 5 years) have an average (not a median) of 26.6+/-11.5 lifetime sexual partners compared to an average of 16.9+/-3 for straights.

Likewise, the GSS dataset that I blogged about below yields similar estimates on the averages, but reports that the median for gay and bisexual men is about 10, compared to a median for straight men of about 6.

2. All the data I've seen supporting the hyper-promiscuous median gay male claim has been junk science. It often refers to real studies -- but to studies of groups that we have no reason to think are representative of the median gay male. The Masters, Johnson & Kolodny college textbook relies on a study that (1) was limited to the San Francisco Bay area, and (2) involved a self-selected sample, not a randomly chosen sample; Schmidt's Straight & Narrow, a book that criticizes homosexuality from a Christian perspective likewise heavily relies on this study, as well as on another survey (Jay & Young) of self-selected respondents. (Schmidt also cites other articles, which I'm getting the library to pull -- if I find that some of the data there is of higher quality, I'll certainly report it.)

actually think this would make an interesting story for mainstream journalists to cover (if they haven't already). I suspect that many thoughtful, generally knowledgeable people believe the myth; I know that I had, based on some stuff that I recall vaguely hearing from the mainstream media in the 1980s. The myth has been spread both by people that oppose homosexuality, and by people who seem to have no such agenda (see Masters, Johnson & Kolodny). As I argue above, the myth is, I think, politically quite salient. But it does appear to be a myth.



posted by maggie at 6:53 PM | link

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