@TheKingOfRhye #265686
That’s indeed a very flawed statistic from the literal 1990s. Slate ran an article debunking it in 1997 by detailing the incredibly dumb methodology and yet it persists. The guy who did the study is Paul Cameron, a relatively infamous anti-gay-rights consultant. He was terminated from membership of the APA in the 80s for shoddy research. Basically what he and his co authors did was read a bunch of urban gay community newsletters and count up obits and news stories about deaths, averaged them out, and called that gay life expectancy, completely ignoring how biased that sample was.
2026 stats from the UK using data from 2021-2024 suggest there’s about a 1 year reduction in life expectancy for gay and bi identifying people (60ish years for straight men, 64ish for straight women). a 2022 study from the US found no excess mortality for gay or bi men but excess mortality for gay or bi women, but their stats were based on data from 1999 to 2014 so already outdated by the time the study came out lol. And they even wrote in their paper that they associate the results with systemic and structural stressors, not something innate to queer life.
Editing to add: Hugely inflated sexual partner stats are generally based on a 1970s-era study on gay men from the SF Bay Area, most of whom were taken from bathhouses, clubs, porn stores, and gay bars, and roughly a quarter of whom were prostitutes. More current representative studies from around the early 2010s from the UK, US, and Australia suggest the majority of gay men have either 0 or 1 sexual partner per year, and about 20 percent had more than 10. something like 2 percent of gay men (specifically in the US study) had more than 50 in a year.