Average gay male sexual partners

Do some gay men have lots of partners while others have very few? Is the inequality in partnerships among gay men greater than how unequally women partners are distributed among heterosexual men? What about straight women versus lesbians? In our last postfocused on heterosexuals, we showed that women partners are more unequally distributed among men than male partners are among women, and that partners are more unequally distributed among singles than those who are in a marital or cohabiting union.

Here, using methods similar to average gay male sexual partners in our previous post, we use Average gay male sexual partners indices to compare gay men, straight men, lesbians, and straight women in how unequally their sexual partnerships are distributed. The technical details of what we did are explained at the end of this post.

As the graph below shows, lesbians have the most unequal distribution of partnerships, followed by gay men, then straight men, with straight women having the most equal distribution. Recall from our previous post that when a group has a higher percent of its members at either extreme this raises their inequality as calculated by the Gini index.

But lesbians have a slightly higher Gini index than gay men. See our caveat about this conclusion in our section on technical details below. As we found in our previous post, female partners are distributed more unequally among straight men than male partners are among straight women mostly because, while one partner is the mode for each group, more men depart from that by having more partners.

Partnerships are most equally distributed among straight women and least so among lesbians; men are intermediate with straight men having a more equal distribution than gay men. As in our last post, we used data on individuals years of age from the National Survey of Family Growth surveys collected between and Our goal was to compare gays and straights within gender, so we excluded those who said they were bisexual.

We divide our analysis into four groups: gay men, straight men, lesbians, and straight women. Respondents were asked their number of same- and other-sex sexual partners in the last year. Heterosexual respondents were asked this question if they reported on a previous question that they had ever had vaginal, oral, or anal sex with an other-sex sexual partner.

Gay men were asked about number of same-sex partners only if they reported on a previous question that they had ever had oral or anal sex with a man. Lesbians were asked about number of same-sex partners if they reported in previous questions that they had ever had any sexual experience with a female partner.

The vast majority of lesbians said they have had oral sex with a woman, so we are relatively confident that we are picking up more than just kissing. For each of our four groups—gay men, straight men, lesbians, and straight women—we calculated two things: 1 what percent of people in the group had 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 or more sexual partners in the last year, and 2 the Gini coefficient.

To facilitate compact presentation, our graphs of what percent of members of a group had various numbers of partners combine those with four or more in a single category. NSFG did this truncation for gay men only. Since this truncation reduces the Gini for this group, we assigned anyone in the other three groups who had over 6 partners a 6 as well for consistency.

Thus a caveat to our conclusions is that, if, within the group of those with more than 4 partners, more gay men than lesbians have had very large number, then we may be understating the Gini for gay men relative to the other groups. In particular, our conclusion that lesbians have a higher Gini than gay men may be suspect.

To calculate the Gini coefficient for each group we treated the number of partners of a given sex people in the group had in the last year just like those studying income inequality treat the number of dollars of income a family had in the last year.

an unequal distribution of partners: gays versus straights

The formula and an explanation of the Gini coefficient applied to income can be found at this link. The smaller the Gini coefficient, the more equal the distribution of partners is. The Gini coefficient is 0 if the resource is absolutely equally distributed.

In the case of income, this would mean that every household had exactly the same income. In the case of sexual partners, it would mean that all members of the group had the same number of partners in the last year. At the other end of the scale, a Gini coefficient of 1 means the maximum inequality.