В соцсетях с завидной регулярностью всплывает один и тот же «сенсационный» тезис: якобы почти 28% гомосексуальных мужчин имели за жизнь более 1000 сексуальных партнеров. Эта цифра неизменно вызывает бурю в комментариях, подпитывая самые разные стереотипы о квир-сообществе.
But behind this flashy infographic lies a classic example of how questionable sociology from half a century ago turns into an eternal viral myth. Let’s look at where this statistic came from and why taking it seriously today is a big mistake.
What study is this, anyway?
The story begins in 1978, when psychologist Alan P. Bell and sociologist Martin S. Weinberg from Kinsey Institute published a large-scale study “Homosexualities”. The authors sought to develop the ideas of sexology pioneer Alfred Kinsey and to describe in detail the lives of homosexual people — at the time, that was an almost revolutionary task.
The study did indeed help a great deal in combating the homophobic prejudices of its time. But decades later, the scientific community itself acknowledges that the methodology of that work, to put it mildly, does not stand up to criticism by today’s standards of sociology.
Why the sample has nothing to do with “gay men in general”
If you look into exactly how the data for the famous figure at 28% was collected, the picture stops being "universal" — for several reasons at once.
Place and time. Bell and Weinberg conducted interviews exclusively in San Francisco in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the time, it was not just a city with a large gay scene, but the epicenter of a unique subculture unlike anything else, at the height of the sexual revolution — before the AIDS epidemic, which changed the sexual practices of an entire generation. Extrapolating the morals of San Francisco from that period to all other queer people in the United States, not to mention the rest of the world, is a methodological error on an almost anecdotal scale.
Who exactly was surveyed. The researchers spoke with 686 men, but recruited respondents mainly in gay bars and bathhouses (essentially sex clubs) in the city — places specifically created for casual sexual encounters. In other words, the sample included the most sexually active and least conventional part of the scene, not the “average” gay man from a typical suburb.
Who exactly ended up in the sample. One particular nuance, which for some reason is never mentioned in clickbait reposts: according to the researchers’ own estimates, about a quarter of the men surveyed were sex workers at the time — which inevitably inflated the final numbers for the number of partners [1].
The authors themselves, incidentally, warned about this quite explicitly. The book states outright that the nonrepresentative sample does not allow any generalizations about the prevalence of this or that phenomenon, even within the city being studied, let alone the general population [2].
Who keeps the myth alive
There is another layer here that is also worth mentioning separately. The number «28% геев имели больше 1000 партнеров» — is not some random viral scrap of statistics wandering around on its own. It has very specific origins in the modern internet: first and foremost, religious and conservative resources such as CARM (Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry) and Exodus Global Alliance, which for years have been publishing compilations of “shocking statistics about homosexuality” with this quote [3][4]. From there, the wording has spread almost verbatim across blogs, memes, and, eventually, social media.
And what do modern data say
Here is the most important thing. Since the Bella and Weinberg study, almost half a century has passed, and since then dozens of far larger and more representative studies of the sexual behavior of gay and bisexual men in different countries have appeared.
Their conclusion differs drastically from the viral cardinal number: the typical number of sexual partners over a lifetime for gay men is around 10–20 — that is, the figure from the meme is overstated by orders of magnitude [5].
It is funny that if you play the same game of selective quoting, you can find studies with the opposite bias: for example, in Kinsey’s 1948 study and in later samples, gay men on average even had fewer partners than heterosexual men [5]. The point is that any numbers torn from context and calculated on a nonrepresentative sample are a poor basis for conclusions about an entire social group, no matter which way they are skewed.
Why the myth doesn’t die in the 21st century
Social media algorithms don’t care about context, sample representativeness, or scientific criticism. The headline “30% of gays have 1,000 partners” works perfectly for engagement: it shocks a conservative audience and gets progressive people arguing. — and that means it will be reposted again and again, regardless of what is actually written there on page 308 of the 1978 book.
So a local excerpt from a half-century-old San Francisco bathhouse keeps living its own life as the “absolute truth about queer people.” The only thing this number really says is how durable beautiful but completely decontextualized myths can be on the internet.
Sources:
[1] RationalWiki — Debunked: gay men have 500-1000 partners — detailed analysis of the origins of and problems with the Bell and Weinberg study
[2] Bell, A., Weinberg, M. Homosexualities (1978), p. 22 — the authors’ note on the sample’s lack of representativeness
[3] CARM.org — Statistics on sexual promiscuity among homosexuals
[4] Exodus Global Alliance — one of the first sites to widely circulate the Bell and Weinberg quote out of context
[5] Summary of modern representative studies of sexual behavior among gay and bisexual men — see the source review in the RationalWiki article
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