GENERAL SOCIAL SURVEY

General Social Survey

General Social Survey

Education and Income

In 1948, Kinsey and his colleagues noted that, given the extent of homosexual activity present in society despite considerable social and legal constraints, there would surely be an increase in such activity if those constraints were to disappear (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948). Social and legal constraints against same-gender sexual activity have not disappeared, but they have declined in recent decades. Thus, it may be becoming easier for people to recognize and act on their sexual attraction to others of their own gender. If so, then it follows that there would have been an increase during recent years in same-gender sexual partnering. This study examines whether there was an increase in same-gender sexual partnering between 1988 and 1998. It also examines the relationship between same-gender sexual partnering and social-demographic characteristics.

A decline in cultural sanctions against same-gender sexual activity is evident on a number of fronts. Sodomy laws have been repealed by the legislatures in 25 states and the District of Columbia and have been struck down by the courts in 6 other states (American Civil Liberties Union, 1999). A number of states, counties, and municipalities now prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in private employment (Human Rights Campaign, 1999), and the early 1990s witnessed the fastest increase in the inclusion of sexual orientation in local civil rights codes (Button, Rienzo, & Wald, 1997). Whereas in 1990 fewer than six companies provided domestic partnership benefits to same-sex couples, by 1999 hundreds of businesses did (Human Rights Campaign, n.d.). There has also been a gradual trend toward granting parental rights to gay and lesbian parents (Stacey, 1998). In addition, the visibility of gay men and lesbians has increased in the media, and gay men and lesbians tend to be portrayed in a more favorable light than they had been in earlier decades (Kaiser, 1997; Parish, 1993).

Attitudes toward same-gender sexual behavior have become more tolerant among the general public since the late 1980s. After increasing during the 1970s and 1980s, the percentage of adults in the General Social Surveys who reported that sexual activity between two adults of the same sex is always wrong dropped from 74.9% in 1988 to 54.6% in 1998. (Samples sizes were 973 in 1988 and 1,874 in 1998.) Moreover, Americans are increasingly likely to agree that a man "who admits that he is a homosexual" should be allowed to make a speech in the community and to teach in a college or university, and they are increasingly less likely to favor removing from the local public library "a book he wrote favoring homosexuality."

Figure 1 shows these trends in American public opinion from 1973 to 1998. There have also been changes in social and economic conditions that may have made it more likely for women to consider other women as sex partners. Women's wages have risen during the last couple of decades (Bianchi, 1995; Wetzel, 1995), thereby increasing women's financial ability to support themselves and their ...