Just for the record, I'm straight, but I still found these numbers to be interesting, and knocking down a lot of sterotypes about gays.
The OKTrends blog is a website that OKCupid uses to post statistical data that they accumulate using their user's profile information, and a lot of it is quite fascinating (obviously not scientific, but still interesting). However, I found their most recent entry to be be quite relevant to today:
Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex
So what are some of the conclusions that they came up with?
- The mortal fear of straight people that teh gays are going to try to convert their children or try to bed them even though they're straight is completely unfounded:
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.
Furthermore
In our dataset, there was not a single gay user, male or female, who primarily searched for straight people.
So, shockingly, most gay people look for other gay people, and aren't out looking for straight people to con into bed or convert.
The second data point they reported deals head on with the "teh gays are a scourge of disease because they have 500 billion different partners." OKCupid found this to be pretty much untrue:
Median Reported Sex Partners
* straight men: 6
* gay men: 6
* straight women: 6
* gay women: 6
Also:
* 45% of gay people have had 5 or fewer partners (vs. 44% for straights)
* 98% of gay people have had 20 or fewer partners (vs. 99% for straights)
About the only difference they found was the top 2%, stating:
It turns out that a tiny fraction of gays have single-handedly two-handedly created the public image of gay sexual recklessness—in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.
So basically, only a very small minority (of an already small minority) truly fits the "promiscuous gay" stereotype. Otherwise, gays appear to have just as many partners as straights.
Another interesting tidbit:
23% of straight people reported having a sexual experience with someone of the same sex, with about 3/4 of those saying that it was a good experience. Another 11% reported that they would like to try.
These numbers are, probably not surprisingly, split by sex. Only 13% of men reported having such an experience, with barely over half stating it was good, and 5% saying they would like to try.
On the other hand, a full 1/3 of women reported having an experience, with 79% saying it was a good experience, and 18% saying they would like to try. For those not so good at math, that puts those who have either had experience, or would like to try the experience, in the (bare) majority of women.
There are also tidbits there, such as the distribution of "gay curious" people by population (hint: typically, the bluer the state, the more gay curious it is), different personality traits by sexual orientation, among other things (you should check it out).
I know this isn't really all that much of a political thing (but in a way it is, I guess). But I did find it pretty interesting.