mindstalk: (robot)
mindstalk ([personal profile] mindstalk) wrote2007-10-15 03:00 am

Got gays?

Some research I did (Excel spreadsheet)
http://mindstalk.net/okcupidgaystats.xls

Method: searching for straight, gay, and bi men and women on the OkCupid personals site. The system acts weirdly if I try to query the whole database, so I searched in varying radii of various cities, e.g. 1000 miles of San Francisco, or 10 miles of Dallas, or 500 miles of Frankfurt, Germany. All ages and relationship statuses. Results vary somewhat, but a rough pattern is
gay guys: 5-7%
bi guys: 2-5%
gay girls: 3-6%
bi girls: 12-19%

Certain places break these ranges: San Francisco, NYC, Northampton ("lesbian capital of the US"), for example. 500 miles of Frankfurt raises the gay and bi girl maxima, among large-radius searches.

Pace Kinsey's "10%", it is true that everywhere has >10% of people self-registered as willing to consider same-sex relationships. Actual homosexuals are less than that, outside of concentrated areas, and apart from Frankfurt gay males outnumber gay females, while bi females outnumber both, and bi males have the same scarcity as gay females. The highest rate of gay males is 11%, in SF; the lowest rate of bi females is 12%, around Dallas. Highest rate of bi males is in Northampton, while NYC is rather low.

(Edit: I late added data for Tokyo, New Delhi, Lima, and Pretoria; the latter three have much lower rates of bi females, 6-8% -- though still twice the rate of gay females.)

[identity profile] heron61.livejournal.com 2007-10-15 08:01 am (UTC)(link)
Well done indeed. Thank you for a valuable bit of research.

[identity profile] fanw.livejournal.com 2007-10-15 01:05 pm (UTC)(link)
Interesting. Of course, these are self-reported so it should clear a few things up, but I wonder about how we categorize folks. It seems that if a man sleeps with a man, no matter how many women he has slept with, society calls him gay, whereas if a woman sleeps with a woman and ever sleeps with men, then she is not lesbian but bi. Take for example the New Jersey governor who came out as "gay". I have a hard time believing it. I mean, perhaps his 20-yr marriage was a complete sham, but he did have two kids. Did it ever cross anyone's mind to label him "bi"? No one ever comes out as "bi", it's just not done, and I'm waiting until someone has the chutzpah to do just that.