But one consequence of my estimate is clear: an awful lot of men in the United States, particularly in intolerant states, are still in the closet. They don’t reveal their sexual preferences on Facebook. They don’t admit it on surveys. And in many cases, they may even be married to women.
It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. They demonstrate that suspicion in the surprisingly common search: “Is my husband gay?” “Gay” is 10 percent more likely to complete searches that begin “Is my husband . . .” than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is eight times more common than “an alcoholic” and ten times more common than “depressed.”
Most tellingly perhaps, searches questioning a husband’s sexuality are far more prevalent in the least tolerant regions. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in twenty-one of the twenty-five states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.
Google and porn sites aren’t the only useful data resources when it comes to men’s sexuality. There is more evidence available in Big Data on what it means to live in the closet. I analyzed ads on Craigslist for males looking for “casual encounters.” The percentage of these ads that are seeking casual encounters with men tends to be larger in less tolerant states. Among the states with the highest percentages are Kentucky, Louisiana, and Alabama.
And for even more of a glimpse into the closet, let’s return to Google search data and get a little more granular. One of the most common searches made immediately before or after “gay porn” is “gay test.” (These tests presume to tell men whether or not they are homosexual.) And searches for “gay test” are about twice as prevalent in the least tolerant states.
What does it mean to go back and forth between searching for “gay porn” and searching for “gay test”? Presumably, it suggests a fairly confused if not tortured mind. It’s reasonable to suspect that some of these men are hoping to confirm that their interest in gay porn does not actually mean they’re gay.
The Google search data does not allow us to see a particular user’s search history over time. However, in 2006, AOL released a sample of their users’ searches to academic researchers. Here are some of one anonymous user’s searches over a six-day period.
Friday 03:49:55
free gay picks [sic]
Friday 03:59:37
locker room gay picks
Friday 04:00:14
gay picks
Friday 04:00:35
gay sex picks
Friday 05:08:23
a long gay quiz
Friday 05:10:00
a good gay test
Friday 05:25:07
gay tests for a confused man
Friday 05:26:38
gay tests
Friday 05:27:22
am i gay tests
Friday 05:29:18
gay picks
Friday 05:30:01
naked men picks
Friday 05:32:27
free nude men picks
Friday 05:38:19
hot gay sex picks
Friday 05:41:34
hot man butt sex
Wednesday 13:37:37
am i gay tests
Wednesday 13:41:20
gay tests
Wednesday 13:47:49
hot man butt sex
Wednesday 13:50:31
free gay sex vidio [sic]
This certainly reads like a man who is not comfortable with his sexuality. And the Google data tells us there are still many men like him. Most of them, in fact, live in states that are less tolerant of same-sex relationships.
For an even closer look at the people behind these numbers, I asked a psychiatrist in Mississippi, who specializes in helping closeted gay men, if any of his patients might want to talk to me. One man reached out. He told me he was a retired professor, in his sixties, and married to the same woman for more than forty years.
About ten years ago, overwhelmed with stress, he saw the psychiatrist and finally acknowledged his sexuality. He has always known he was attracted to men, he says, but thought that this was universal and something that all men just hid. Shortly after beginning therapy, he had his first, and only, gay sexual encounter, with a student of his who was in his late twenties, an experience he describes as “wonderful.”
He and his wife do not have sex. He says that he would feel guilty ever ending his marriage or openly dating a man. He regrets virtually every one of his major life decisions.
The retired professor and his wife will go another night without romantic love, without sex. Despite enormous progress, the persistence of intolerance will cause millions of other Americans to do the same.
You may not be shocked to learn that 5 percent of men are gay and that many remain in the closet. There have been times when most people would have been shocked. And there are still places where many people would be shocked as well.
“In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, insisted in 2007. “In Iran we do not have this phenomenon.” Likewise, Anatoly Pakhomov, mayor of Sochi, Russia, shortly before his city hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics, said of gay people, “We do not have them in our city.” Yet internet behavior reveals significant interest in gay porn in Sochi and Iran.
This raises an obvious question: are there any common sexual interests in the United States today that are still considered shocking? It depends what you consider common and how easily shocked you are.
Most of the top searches on PornHub are not surprising—they include terms like “teen,” “threesome,” and “blowjob” for men, phrases like “passionate love making,” “nipple sucking,” and “man eating pussy” for women.
Leaving the mainstream, PornHub data does tell us about some fetishes that you might not have ever guessed existed. There are women who search for “anal apples” and “humping stuffed animals.” There are men who search for “snot fetish” and “nude crucifixion.” But these searches are rare—only about ten every month even on this huge porn site.