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The Polls |
Same-Gender Sex Among U.S. Adults
Trends Across the Twentieth Century and During the 1990s
CHARLES F. TURNER is a professor of applied social research at the City University of New York (Queens College and the Graduate Center) and a scientist with the Program in Health and Behavior Measurement at RTI International. MARIA A. VILLARROEL, ELIZABETH EGGLESTON, and SUSAN M. ROGERS are also scientists with the RTI’s Program in Health and Behavior Measurement. JAMES R. CHROMY is a fellow with RTI’s Statistical Research Division. The authors are grateful for the helpful comments of Andrew Beveridge, William Miller, Tom Smith, and Jonathan Zenilman. They are not, of course, responsible for any errors we may have made. The work reported in this article was undertaken to understand an unexpected finding from our 1999–2000 National STD and Behavior Measurement Experiment. The major conclusion of this work was first publicly presented in our abstract for the 2002 meetings of the American Public Health Association (Villarroel et al. 2002) , and a full report of these results was first submitted for publication elsewhere in July 2003. Working independently, Amy Butler has conducted parallel analyses using data from the General Social Survey and from Laumann et al. (1994). She reported her findings at the 2004 annual meeting of the Population Association of America. Readers interested in this topic are encouraged to also consult her manuscript (Butler 2004).
Address correspondence to Charles F. Turner at cft{at}rti.org.
Trends in reporting of same-gender sex are assessed using data from the 1998–2002 General Social Surveys (Ns = 9,487 males and 12,336 females). Analyses indicate that the reported prevalence of female-female sexual contact increased substantially and monotonically across twentieth-century birth cohorts, rising from 1.6 percent (Standard error [SE] = 0.60) for the cohort of U.S. women born prior to 1920 to 6.9 percent (SE = 0.81) for women born in 1970 and afterward. Increases in the reported prevalence of female-female contacts also occurred within the 1990s. These trends persist when statistical controls are introduced for changes in attitudes toward same-gender sexual behavior. No parallel trend is observed in the reporting of male-male sexual contacts during adulthood, although the proportion of U.S. men reporting such contacts in the past year and in the past five years increased during the 1990s.
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