Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex

October 12th, 2010 by Christian Rudder

Gay issues have been in the news a lot lately, from the debate over same-sex marriage in Congress to a sickening rash of gay-bashing here in New York City. We see a lot of emotion out there, instead of information, and we wanted to provide some data-based context on sexuality so that people might make better choices about what they say, think, and do.

We run a massive dating site and therefore have unparalleled insight into sex and relationships. Here's what we've found, in numbers and charts.

First of all, gay sexuality is not a threat.

Gay people are not sexually interested in straights.

The subtext to a lot of homophobic thinking is the idea that gays will try to get straight people into bed at the first opportunity, or that gays are looking to "convert" straights. Freud called this concept schwanzangst; the U.S. Army calls it Don't Ask Don't Tell.

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.
Furthermore
In our dataset, there was not a single gay user, male or female, who primarily searched for straight people.

Gay people aren't promiscuous.

Another common myth about gay people is that they sleep around, but the statistical reality is that gay people as a group aren't any more slutty than straights.

Median Reported Sex Partners
  • straight men: 6
  • gay men: 6
  • straight women: 6
  • gay women: 6

Here's how the distribution curves compare:

  • 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)

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.

Straight people have gay sex, too.

Another inquiry that had unexpected results: we asked 252,900 straight people have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?

Almost a quarter answered 'yes'.

Click the airport-bathroom style icons to toggle the sex(es) displayed. Not unexpectedly, more women than men have had same-sex desires:

    straight women's same-sex desires:
  • 1 in 3 straight women has hooked up with another woman.
  • and of those who haven't, over 1 in 4 would like to.

As for straight men, a surprisingly high 13% have had a same-sex experience, and another 5% haven't yet but would like to.

Using the incredible power of computers, we were able to break down this question geographically. Here are straight people who either have had or would like to have a same-sex experience in the continental U.S. and lower Canada. You can see some sharp geographic divides.

Awesomely, the mountain West lives up to its Brokeback reputation, and Canada is orange nearly coast-to-coast. Even in the yellow and blue areas, you can see pockets of gay curiosity in interesting places: Austin, Madison, Asheville. Anywhere soy milk is served, basically.

Sidenote

Doing the research for this post, I came across many awful things our elected officials have said about gay people; here's a relatively calm example:

For starters, I found that a fun game to play with stuff like this is to replace the words "homosexual" and "gay" with "politician"—then you have something that's actually true.

I also spent a lot of time looking up match questions to debunk this particular claim. Down in the database I discovered one question with a surprising disparity, not between orientations, but between genders. Like Frodo to the Balrog, I wished I'd never unearthed it.

Come on, people. #facepalm.

Beyond Sex: Gay & Straight Personalities

More than just asking about specific desires and behaviors, our match questions are designed to tease out our users' underlying personalities. We've collected over 669 million answers from users so far. Below is a straight/gay comparison on 23 personality categories. You can mouse-over the ?s for each category to pop-up some examples of the many questions that affect it.

Two things: (1) The idea of the typical straight man as a kind bullying jock seems to be broadly true, though there is also a strong dork streak there, as well.

(2) Looking closely at the chart for females, we can improve upon Marx's famous dictum.

Religion is the opiate of the masses, so long as the masses are straight. However, amass a bunch of lesbians and you're going to need actual drugs.

In any event, a lot of these measured traits are reflected by the users' own words. Like we did before with race, we looked at the interests and tastes statistically unique to the different orientations, according to their personal profiles. We crunched millions of words of essay text and found the phrases most correlated to a particular sexual preference; again, these are the users' own words.

The Stuff Gay People Like

For both sexes, a lot of this stuff is way stereotypical. The size of the phrases indicate their relative popularity to the norm, and I actually had to shrink "The L Word" down to fit in our template. Meanwhile gay men's interests speak for themselves, evidently with an exaggerated lisp.

Compare those lists to their equally typical straight counterparts, below. It's like two zen koans, one by Meg Ryan, one by a viking:

The Stuff Straight People Like

As you can see, sexual orientation makes a huge difference in the words you choose to describe yourself. The small but enormous difference between lesbians' a girlfriend and straight women's my girlfriends says it all.

We extended this gay vs. straight analysis and for each orientation measured the frequencies of all one-, two-, and three-word phrases against the site-wide rates. Here's the breakdown:

There's no question that according to this analysis gay people are "different;" as you can see, gay interests and self-descriptions have little to do with the mainstream's. In fact what these numbers are saying is that the average gay person has only about 30% in common with the average American. But, ironically enough, when it comes to identity, it's hardly rare to be an outlier here. Adding an ethnic group to the plot helps put it in perspective:

Of course, as far as I know, no one's saying that Indians shouldn't get married or shouldn't be allowed to adopt children. The people of Louisiana even elected Bobby Jindal, an openly Indian man, as their governor!

We hope gay people can expect the same treatment very soon.

Adventurous

Would you consider trying food without being told what it is?

Would you consider permanently living in another country?

Would you ever get on a motorcycle?

Aggressive

Do you like to argue?

Have you ever yelled at the TV?

Do you go to great lengths to avoid conflict?

Ambitious

Would you be happy raising the kids while your spouse worked?

Which comes first for you, work or friends?

Do you want to be famous?

Artsy

Are you an aspiring actor/artist/writer or other creative type?

Do you like going to museums?

Do movies with subtitles bother you?

Compassionate

Is it your responsibility to help your fellow human beings?

Are you the type of person to tell a homeless person to get a job?

Do overweight people annoy you?

Competitive

Is it important to you to have the last word in an argument?

Do you like board games?

If someone wrongs you...do you eventually exact revenge?

Confident

Would you say you're smarter than average?

Are you okay with trying things that you're bad at?

Are you intimidated by a partner who is more sexually experienced than you?

Dorky

Do you think the International Space Station would be a cool place to get married?

Do you know what 'http' stands for?

Do you own any dice with more than six sides?

Generous

Do you give your best friend a birthday gift?

How much do you give each year to charity?

When you loan something small to a friend, do you really care if it gets returned?

Horny

How often do you think about sex?

How often do you masturbate?

Ideally, how many dates would you go on with someone before you have sex?

Into Drugs

What's your relationship to marijuana?

Do you think drug use with your partner can be a romantic activity?

Have you tried hard drugs, like, anything you need to 'cook'?

Into Sports

Do you play actual sports?

Do you enjoy exercise?

Do you have a favorite sports team, that you really like to follow?

Introverted

Does the idea of staying in and reading a book on a Friday night appeal to you?

Do you need "alone time" to re-charge after social situations?

At parties, do you go up and talk to people?

Kinky

Does group sex sound like a great idea?

Do you like sex toys?

Have you ever used nipple clamps?

Literary

Can you name an author from each continent (besides Antarctica)?

In high school, did you read books that weren't assigned in class?

Do spelling mistakes annoy you?

Optimistic

Do things generally turn out for the best?

Can just one person significantly change the world?

Do you think happiness is possible for all people?

Polite

Do you say something like 'bless you' when a stranger sneezes?

Do you hold the door for people?

Are you frequently under-dressed for special occasions?

Political

Have you ever marched in a protest?

Is it a person's civic duty to vote?

Do you know who your state's Senators are?

Romantic

Have you been around candlelight recently?

Do you like costume dramas?

Do you like to say 'I love you'?

Religious

Do you believe in the power of prayer?

Is there a God?

Do you believe in miracles? You sexy thing?

Spontaneous

Do you bring an umbrella if it looks like rain?

Do you often find yourself bored in relationships after a few months?

Have you ever had a one-night stand?

Trusting

Do you think most people give to charity?

Do you ever leave your drink unattended at a bar?

Do you think a straight man and a straight woman can truly just be friends?

Violent

Would you find it easier to kill for your beliefs or to die for them?

Have you ever thrown an object in anger during an argument?

Do you own a gun?

702 Responses to “Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex”

  1. RAB says:

    To whoever that “Anonymous” person is writing about some jail sentence:

    First of all, the fact that you’re even in jail makes me think you are complete idiot, regardless of whether or not you actually committed a crime. Clearly if you are in jail you either did something for it, or you were hanging out with the wrong group of people – either way, it shows you are a complete retard.

    Secondly, comparing gay people who are in prison to gay people who are not in prison is a complete mute point also. Just because a gay guy in jail acted crazy and wanted to have sex with you, doesn’t mean all of the other gays in the world do (and by the sound of your story, I’m sure most gays would run in the opposite direction after they saw your face). Hannibal Lector was straight, so should I assume that because he chopped people up and ate them that all other straight people do too? No. Use some logic.

    Third, gay guys who get the most attention are the ones who act dramatic. So those are the ones who you probably see on TV and in the news and shit. Those kinds of gays probably only make up 10% of the gay population – the rest of 90% pretty much act exactly like everyone else.

    Grow up, get over yourself, and quit acting like a fucking baby.

  2. Kristen says:

    This was amazing thank you for doing this maybe people will open their eyes now.

  3. Emily O. says:

    This is hilarious to me… like, LOVE the article, fascinating statistics, and I love OKCupid for being so cool and liberal re: queers, as opposed to most other dating sites.

    I was literally laughing out loud about the things lesbians like vs. straight people + gay men… “THE L WORD” rooofl.

    Also that lesbians love drugs, hahaha. Cracking up.

  4. Alicat says:

    Why yes, as a matter of fact, Oregon *does* rock.

  5. batir says:

    @Ruby

    Yeah, because men aren’t allowed to enjoy friendship, or value it highly. No, it’s because they’re secretly gay.

    -rolls eyes-

  6. Johnny says:

    I am a gay guy who has a lot more in common with straight men than with the stereotypical gay profile you’ve featured here. I do not like Katy Perry, Moulin Rouge or the theater, and haven’t heard of a few of the other things in the gay male word cloud. I do like Van Halen, Burn Notice, Taxi Driver, UFC, and “a few beers.” Be careful when you write a report like this that you don’t mistake the “typical” gay man as a substitute for all gay men. I think you crossed that line here. Just because there’s an identifiable norm, that doesn’t mean it’s safe to generalize and try to smash everyone into that narrow sliver of personality.

    Also, I am attracted to straight guys and have successfully gotten a few into bed. A couple times it was even the straight guy who surprisingly seduced me. That said, your surprise that 13% of self-identified straight men have had same-sex encounters must mean you have never heard of a certain guy named Kinsey. If I remember right, he found that somewhere around 30 or 40 percent of his male subjects had tried sex with a man. Maybe your users are underreporting (or persistent and ubiquitous cultural stigma and anti-gay propaganda have made men less adventurous than they were back in his day, when people didn’t talk so openly about sexuality and closeted gay ministers weren’t all over the TV telling people they’d go to hell for being gay).

  7. Slutty? says:

    Maybe I’m slutty (or just older), but I don’t know one person who has openly admitted their number of partners to me to be lower than 25, gay or straight. In most instances, among my friends it’s significantly higher. 6 partners? No way. Ridiculous.

  8. Johnny says:

    I commented before about how I have fooled around with straight men. Should have mentioned that you wouldn’t know that from any dating site I’ve been on because I would not waste my time contacting a straight guy online who is actively looking to date a woman. It’s more something that has to happen face to face and usually with several beers involved. As someone mentioned above, extrapolating data from the behaviors and expressed preferences of one particular dating site does not a conclusive study make.

  9. Tim says:

    OkCupid, I <3 you for posting this.

    And the person who met awful gay guys in jail, they were in JAIL. Who did you expect – the Prime Minister of England? They are there for a reason – and come to think of it, you probably were, too.

    Just food for thought.

  10. Jim says:

    I listed myself as Bi, end up playing as gay. Am surprised at the number of profile visits I get from guys listed as straight. I often msg to ask why they looked at me. Most don’t reply at all. Some reply that they don’t remember. Two replied that they wanted a female, but until they find one, they’ll take what they can get. Even if it’s another guy. Perhaps for some, “straight” is a cultural preference but not an absolute.

  11. anon says:

    No one cares about your far left views and intolerance of dissenting opinions, so leave them out of articles please.

  12. Grampa says:

    This is nice, but I it does not have random sampling and thus is suspect as trustworthy data. One must keep in mind that users of OKCupid are a self-selected group and therefore probably not representative of the population at large. Just sayin.

  13. Howard DuBin says:

    It was interesting to see we( gay) individuals are as normal as everyone else.. It is nice to know that sexual orientation has little to do with the other stuff in a human’s world…of course stereo-typing will always exist….thanks for the info…

  14. Meg says:

    I disagree with the equation of owning a gun to being the violent type. I own a gun for home defense and shooting skeet, but I would never hunt animals (and rarely even squash a bug), for example. I don’t like violent movies. I just live in Texas where it’s normal to own a gun.

  15. SC says:

    Where’s the diagrams for women? You indicate that you had to shrink the L Word, but there’s no diagram displaying it.

  16. Ackthpt says:

    Anonymous @ 10:46, Oct13th:

    Jail is not a typical environment, yet is the only explanation for your short-sighted view. Life in the world isn’t life in jail.

    Sorry jailbird.

  17. Evan says:

    I’m curious. If you ignore the data from the people who got the sun/earth question wrong, does the resulting set change significantly at all?

  18. Christopher Buczek says:

    “In fact what these numbers are saying is that the average gay person has only about 30% in common with the average American.”

    Yes, we citizens of Urania may often look and sound much like you Americans but ours is a proud race from a distant world, the matching up of same-genitals is but only one of the many ways we are inscrutably different from you actual citizens.

  19. Christopher says:

    “There’s no question that according to this analysis gay people are “different;” as you can see, gay interests and self-descriptions have little to do with the mainstream’s. In fact what these numbers are saying is that the average gay person has only about 30% in common with the average American. ”

    Yes, we inhabitants of Urania are inscrutably different than Americans, the alignment of same-genitals being only one way in which we confound the notions and practices of actual citizens of this country.

  20. lizzygaga says:

    Haha yyyeeahh…. Oregon….

  21. Rachel says:

    I’m glad you posted this. It’s nice to see a defense for all the GLBT folks out there.

  22. jokey joker says:

    regarding the earth or sun being bigger question.

    You failed to add “when correcting for perspective”

    NOW whose the idiot. :-)

  23. Richard says:

    THANK YOU!!!!

    Please, let’s get this OUT THERE!!!!!

  24. Fred says:

    I don’t know, I watched this O’Rielly Factor episode and it was pretty convincing that they ARE stealing our children and ruining our family values. Just sayin’.

  25. luis pinon says:

    as i was watching ufc reading this, i couldn’t help to think maybe im not gay, cuzz aside from being in love with a man, i relate mostly to the “straight” stuff.

  26. Miguel says:

    Now some commissions and groups are looking to ban dirty dancing.* Though you evidence might prove you present empirical data, you ought to share that picking the right answer will get person reading the right journals.** Perhaps, I really don’t know if your cite and generator works in this fashion.

    *John Tesh, Intelligence for life.
    **OkCupid Trends.

  27. Tim says:

    There’s only one thing better than gay sex OR straight sex – Kick-ass fact-o-fitti.
    Love it,
    Thanks team.

  28. Doc says:

    It’s not an issue of gay rights anymore, we’re long past that. The problem is the gay community is looking for acceptance someplace it has no business seeking it… In public.

    By that I mean when someone announces to the world their sexual preference, they’re announcing to the world what they like to do in their bedrooms.

    You don’t see women bragging on the news about their sex toys, or men confessing on national TV they enjoy humping fresh fruit.

    Why then is it acceptable for gay men and women to announce to everyone they prefer members of the same sex?

    I’m not suggesting a return to the closet, but please keep it in the bedroom.

  29. sarah says:

    hooray for all the pro-gay stuff, but as a straight female i am horrified by the interests of the straight female… i hate country, church, nicholas sparks, lipgloss and just about everything else on there… who’d you poll? southern bells and cheerleaders?

  30. Heather says:

    thank you for this information. knowledge is power and i love PEOPLE.

  31. marishane says:

    In my country, most gay people would want to date straight people. I’m not really sure though, but I’ve known a lot who do so? Or maybe I’m just not aware of the other partners’ orientation. But our media is portraying these stereotypes, you know, gay dating straight, so it made me really confused about gay people’s preferences for a partner. It’s wrong to generalize though.

  32. Matthew Willard says:

    You guys are ignoring something important: people are not providing these answers anonymously and are doing so in order to present themselves to potential mates. So the rates of same-sex experience reported by straight males are likely to be heavily underreported. There’s less stigma on F-on-F action, so these numbers are of course higher.

    How many guys seeking to find a woman would be honest about wanting to try sex with another male?

    Clayton

  33. XJ9 says:

    I don’t get why the “profile correlation to the norm” was even included. The “norm” always favors the group that is greatest in number. Surprise, there are more straight people, statistically speaking they will always define the average. It has nothing to do with being “deviant” in a social sense. If you did the same analysis on a dating site with mostly gay members, you’d get the opposite results.

  34. Lauren says:

    Soooo…This is the weirdest thing I’ve read in a long time. Where did the information really come from? Is this just based on the dating website? WTF? Love the pie charts BTW. But none-the-less, weird.

  35. Matt says:

    I think this is an awesome article although I think that gay men are far more kinky then straight men are, but otherwise this is good stuff! :-)

  36. GAIL SHERMAN says:

    AS A MOTHER OF TWO WONDERFUL GIRLS, BOTH GAY, I APPRECIATE EVERY SINGLE STATISTIC THAT PUTS THEM OUT OF HARMS WAY. YOU SEE , THE ONLY THING I EVER, I REPEAT EVER HAD AGAINST THEIR INBORN SEXUAL PREFERRANCE WAS THAT THEY WOULD BE HURT AND PERSECUTED BY IT!!! THANK GOD THEY BOTH HAVE FOUND WONDERFUL PARTNERS, I STILL WORRY! MELLISSA ETHTERIGE , ABOUT SCARECROW (MATTHEW)..NEED I SAY MORE? EXCEPT ..THANK yOU!

  37. julie says:

    @Tim –HAHA “Prime Minister of England”; that was a great post!

  38. QueenDee says:

    Stellar article!!I shared it and gave it a thumbs up for stumble. Herre’s to hoping it goes viral!

  39. steponme says:

    1) i read this last night and heard it referenced on ELVIS DURAN MORNING SHOW this morning. congrats!
    2) i, too, would like to hear more about the bi population of okc. how many are just drunk-curious? lol?
    3) people need to get over it and realize YES this is not representative of the actual human population, just a bunch of creepers stalking the internet. which, by the way, is made up of more gays/bis/others than straights.*
    4) more number crunching and conclusion-drawing from correlations plz!

    *my own observation, kthx.

  40. Trendie says:

    I love the research you did amazing job. I need to print this out for some of my family to read. Thank you so much

  41. tj says:

    dudes, why did you cut off the canada map?

  42. Tim says:

    Dude on the lower left, isn’t he in Bishop Allen?

  43. Zorra31 says:

    Excellent article! Thanks for graphing it. :)

  44. Alex says:

    Wow! This is truly thought provoking!

  45. krick says:

    @Slutty?

    I’m a 40 year old straight man, reasonably successful, 6’3″, a full head of hair, not overweight, and not bad looking from what other people tell me. I’ve only had 3 sexual partners, 6 if you count non-intercourse encounters where one or both people had orgasms.

    When I was younger, I was in several very long-term relationships. Now that I’m older, I’ve been focusing on my career so I don’t really have the time or energy to date.

    If I was going to venture back into the dating scene, I’m fairly certain that someone with 25+ sexual partners would be an immediate turn-off. I think I’d set my upper limit at 12 partners for a prospective mate.

  46. w says:

    who fucking cares

  47. Greg says:

    Not to be a stats jerk, but the bit about Lesbians and drugs is a misinterpretation of the data you have. The fields break out ´shares´ that is the ratio of lesbian drug use to heterosexual female drug use. For your ´modification´ of Marx to be accurate, it would need to be based on actual drug use rates. That is, we don´t actually know how often Lesbians use drugs, or which ones, based on a ratio to heterosexual women´s drug use. They could both consume in lower rates than men without coming into conflict with your ratios. Also, saying that 2% of gay men have 23% of gay sex based on number of partners is not very convincing. Most people do not have sex a set number of times with each partner. For all you know, the folks with 23 partners have had sex exactly 23 times (I know thats extreme) whereas the folks with only 4 or 5 could include within that set someone they have been fucking every day for the last decade. As for the map, good use of ArcGIS but it seems you couldn´t find census tract level data for canada, only provincial. Is there a coloration for state-level means in the us too? It seems a bit of a stretch to believe that patterns conform to state boundaries, so cleanly in the mountain west/plains region yet less so in California. Lastly, according to your word search, as a self’identified heterosexual male I have more in common with Lesbians, loving the trifecta of Ani Difranco, Piercings and Tea… but I am nerdy, as this rant of a former stats TA serves notice of. Regardless of the problems of interpretation I point out, I want to thank you for bringing the power of statistics, electronic mapping and a large (but clearly skewed and unrepresentative, for reasons we can get into another time( to bear on this pressing issue. You have clearly shown that North Americans, fluent english speakers and computer savy younger folks are not generally identifiable on basis of sexual identity through anything other than their cultural markers, which may themselves be referential to sexual identities.

  48. Adam says:

    This is definitely one of the most fantastic and poignant articles that I’ve read in a long time. This ought to be direct, irrefutable and mathematical confirmation that homophobia is nothing more than outdated, ridiculous ignorance of the truth.

  49. W0LF says:

    For all of you whining bitches that are moaning about how Bisexuals aren’t factored in take a look at those pie charts once more. 25% of Straight persons on OKC have answered that they have engaged in sexual relations of a nature that is counter to the definition of Straight. There is possibly a small portion of those people who just didn’t read the question carefully enough and thought they were electing to be served the salmon, but it’s looking like maybe of the Bisexuals on OKC may not be advertising their sexual preferrence correctly. I appreciate that you would rather game the system to screen out humans that don’t fit your definition of ideal but until Bisexuals are identifying as gay or straight they will never have an accurate demographic. If you want to be counted, be accountable.

  50. Beck says:

    Thank you okc!!!

    This is awesome
    and awesome proof

    And my uni says its impossible to do a true population sample hehe (I know this isnt really one, but its damn close)