A new study has found that the number of Americans who are exclusively homosexual is 1.7% of men and .9% of women, a number that has been stable over the years. But the number of Americans who report having sex with someone of their own gender has doubled over the last two decades, to 8.2% for men and 8.7% for women.
The main issue today may not be homosexuality but bisexuality. Furthermore, it would seem that this is experimentation due to the new social acceptability of gay behavior. And that, whatever is the case about gay identity, many people can, in fact, choose whether or not to experiment with homosexual sex. As for bisexuals, they can be encouraged to marry a member of the opposite sex, being faithful to that spouse despite temptations from whatever gender, like everyone else is expected to.
After the jump, read a story about this study, which gives details about how this varies generationally, with women compared to men, how church attendance makes a difference, and how sexuality is “fluid” (despite what we were told when gay marriage was an open issue).
From Stacey Burling, Study: More Americans say they have had gay sex, Philadelphia Inquirer:
A growing number of Americans are having gay sex, or at least admitting to it. And that’s OK with more and more of us.
“People over time are reporting more same-sex sexual experiences than ever before,” said Brooke Wells, a social psychologist at Widener University’s Center for Human Sexuality Studies.
The behavioral trend, reflected in an annual survey conducted between 1973 and 2014, was fueled largely by people who had sex with both men and women. There has been little change in the number of people reporting exclusively homosexual behavior.
The changes were reported Wednesday in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The research team included faculty from Widener, Florida Atlantic, and San Diego State Universities. A total of 33,728 people answered the survey over the 41-year period.
The number of U.S. adults who said they had at least one same-sex sexual partner doubled between the early 1990s – that question wasn’t asked earlier – and the early 2010s, from 3.6 to 8.7 percent for women and from 4.5 to 8.2 percent for men. Bisexual behavior rose from 3.1 to 7.7 percent, accounting for most of the change.
The survey found that only 1.7 percent of men and 0.9 percent of women said they had exclusively homosexual sex.
Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents who said they believed same-sex behavior was “not wrong at all” rose dramatically, from 11 percent in 1973 and 13 percent in 1990 to 49 percent in 2014.
Among men, the youngest and oldest generations had the smallest proportion reporting same-sex sex from 2010 to 2014: 7.5 percent. That compared with 8.2 percent of baby boomers and 9 percent of those in Generation X.
For women, same-sex experiences are much more common among those who are younger. Only 2.4 percent of women born before 1945 said they had had sex with another woman. More than 12 percent of Millennials and 11 percent of Generation Xers said in the latest surveys that they had done so.
Women who attended church once a month or more were less likely to have sex with other women.
[Keep reading. . .]
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