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How deep in the closet are these men? Obviously, it is possible for a gay man not to acknowledge his sexuality to Facebook or surveys but to still have healthy, open same-sex relationships.īut data from, one of the country’s largest dating sites, which has high rates of membership for both straight and gay men, reveals a similarly large number of missing gay men in less tolerant states. In states where the stigma against homosexuality remains strong, many more gay men are in the closet than are out. For comparison, about 3.6 percent of American men tell anonymous surveys they are attracted to men and a tenth of gay men say that they do not tell most of the important people in their lives.
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These results suggest that the closet remains a major factor in American life. Note that this matches nicely with the evidence from pornographic search data. In a perfectly tolerant world, my model estimates that about 5 percent of men in the United States would say they were interested in men. My preliminary research indicates that for every 20 percentage points of support for gay marriage about one-and-a-half times as many men from that state will identify openly as gay on Facebook. Since less tolerant states have similar percentages of gay men but far fewer openly gay men, there is a clear relationship between tolerance and openness. (Women search, too, but in much smaller numbers.) The advantage of this data source, of course, is that most men are making these searches in private. I used anonymous, aggregate data from Google. These would include searches for such terms as “gay porn” or “Rocket Tube,” a popular gay pornographic site. We can approach the question of whether intolerant areas actually have fewer gay men another way, too, by estimating the percent of searches for pornography that are looking for depictions of gay men. Because high school students are less mobile than adults, this suggests that a gay exodus from these areas is not a large factor.
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The percent of male high school students who identify themselves as gay on Facebook is also much lower in less tolerant areas. I estimate that the openly gay population would be about 0.1 percentage points higher in the least tolerant states if everyone stayed in place. (This information is available only for a subset of Facebook users.) Some gay men do move out of less tolerant states, but this effect is small. I searched gay and straight men by state of birth and state of current residence. Have many of them moved to more tolerant areas? Some have, but Facebook data show that mobility can explain only a small fraction of the difference in the totally out population. On Facebook, for example, about 1 percent of men in Mississippi who list a gender preference say that they are interested in men in California, more than 3 percent do.Īre there really so many fewer gay men living in less tolerant states? There is no evidence that gay men would be less likely to be born in these states. While these data sources all measure different degrees of openness, one result is strikingly similar: All three suggest that the openly gay population is dramatically higher in more tolerant states, defined using an estimate by Nate Silver of support for same-sex marriage. There are three sources that can give us estimates of the openly gay population broken down by state: the census, which asks about same-sex households Gallup, which has fairly large-sample surveys for every state and Facebook, which asks members what gender they are interested in.