News :: GLBT
Study :: Straight Men are Having Gay SexTuesday Mar 27, 2007 Nearly one in 10 men who say they’re straight have sex with other men, a recent New York City survey found. And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married to women.
In fact, 10% of all married men in the survey report same-sex behavior during the past year.
In 2003, a team led by Preeti Pathela, DrPH, of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, performed telephone interviews with nearly 4,200 New York City men. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Polish, and Haitian Creole.
In nearly every previous study of sexual behavior, the percentage of men who reported sex with men was higher than the percentage of men who reported being gay.
So Pathela and her colleagues first asked the participants if they were bisexual, gay, or straight. Then they asked about specific sexual behaviors.
Some of the findings include the following:
- Straight-identified men who have sex with men report fewer sex partners than gay-identified men.
- Straight-identified men who have sex with men report fewer STDs in the past year than gay-identified men.
- Straight-identified men who have sex with men are less likely than gay-identified men to report using a condom during their last sexual encounter.
- Straight-identified men who have sex with men are more likely to be foreign born than gay-identified men.
Because they report fewer STDs and fewer sex partners than gay-identified men, straight-identified men who have sex with men may think they are at a lower risk of HIV and STDs. Pathela notes that this isn’t necessarily so.
The men with whom these straight-identified men have sex may themselves have multiple sex partners and elevated STD and HIV risk, and the low rate of condom use makes the straight-identified men vulnerable.
This means safe-sex messages aimed at straight and gay men are likely missing this important subgroup, suggests Pathela.
"To reduce the burden of sexually-transmitted diseases and HIV infection among men who have sex with men, it is of utmost importance for [health care] providers to take a sexual history that ascertains the sex of a partner," Pathela reports. "Asking about a patient’s sexual identity will not adequately assess his risk."
Instead, "prevention messages should focus on the activities that pose risk - for example, unprotected receptive anal sex - and should not be framed to appeal solely to gay-identified men," Pathela suggests.
The findings appeared in the Sept. 19, 2006 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
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