Why are gay guys so promiscuous

Homosexuality shows a reasonably high heritability. Research has found that lesbians are inclined toward even less promiscuous lives than heterosexual women. Researchers repeatedly find that. A recent study found that over two million gay American men had not had any sex in the last five years. Still, it remains true that some gay men are profoundly promiscuous, but the numbers are smaller than some people think.

Researchers concluded that a number of factors encourage homosexual male promiscuity, including the presence of popular meeting places and the “absence of cultural forces that encourage monogamy.”. All sound alarms about the homosexual culture of sexual freedom, warning that its promiscuous pursuit by a core of gay men threatens to perpetuate epidemic AIDS. As viruses go, HIV is fragile. The stereotype that gay men are particularly promiscuous, or are more likely to cheat, runs deep in the threads of our perception.

This also applies to women who are attracted to multiple genders, with the misconception that, because their sexuality is fluid, they have a high chance of cheating as well. G ay men sleep around much more than straight men. That's true, isn't it? Even gay people would admit that, right? It is unequivocal. Or so you might think. Last week one of the world's largest dating websites, OkCupid , collated and published the results of their user "match" questions, which are designed to find out as much as they can about their 4 million members in order to help them find dates.

The statistics are startling. Of course, as with all statistics, there are flaws. This sample is largely North Americans who use the internet to find dates. How, therefore, can it be representative of the general population? But are those people — gay or straight — who go online looking for love and sex really going to be less promiscuous than those that don't? I doubt it. For the first time we have a statistical glimpse into an unreported truth: that your average gay person's sex life is every bit as dreary and unremarkable as a heterosexual's.

But that a tiny proportion of them are freakishly promiscuous. Sex, it would seem, is distributed as unevenly as money. And yet, that is not the narrative we have been fed.

"Sex Panic", a more radical gay

The idea of the rampaging predatory homosexual is so ingrained in the western psyche as to inform not only fear, hatred and abuse but also policy and laws. Part of the justification of Bill Clinton's risible "don't ask, don't tell" policy , preventing gay people in the military from coming out, was fuelled by the belief that in doing so their straight colleagues would either feel at risk or actually be at risk of unwanted sexual advances.

And here is where these online statistics get even more interesting. Gay people, apparently, don't even want sex with straight people. Just 0. And just 0. The theoretical idea of the heterosexual male might be appealing for gay men — a tryst with Brad Pitt or George Clooney, perhaps — but in practice we are making no efforts to turn the theory into a reality. There wasn't even one single gay user of the website who predominantly searched for straight users.

Not one. Straight men of the world, you are safe. But this reveals a universal truth about human nature: people, of all races, orientations, genders and classes, crave depictions of their lives in the arts. We need narratives we can relate to. This is why Stonewall was right to condemn the BBC in July for failing to tell our stories , pointing out that only 1. By contrast, ITV, which is much less obliged to portray minorities, came out at 6.

You might think that this is unimportant, that it's just TV, and a few harmless stereotypes. But any gay person will tell you that when they were growing up, the lives they saw on screen informed them precisely about the kind of life they had to look forward to. It was fleeting but tender.