I did a bit of Googling and found the original study on the CDC website. (You can find it too, here.) I printed it out and carried it around, and read it when I got a chance: a few minutes at lunch, spread out on the kitchen table, or while hiding in the private room with plumbing, the only peaceful place in a household with kids.
So what did this study actually say? Well, with 56 pages and 29 tables, it said a lot. Everything reported in the two Washington papers was accurate, but each reporter picked out results they found particularly significant. In fairness to the Washington Post, the press release on the study did emphasize teen participation in oral sex. An increasing number of teens appear to be using oral sex as a birth control method. Experts quoted by the Post are rethinking their “safe sex” messages since oral sex spreads some sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes, an the human papillomavirus.
Kudos to Cheryl Wetzstein, the author of the Washington Times article: she must have actually opened the study and not just the press releases. I found the basis of her headline right in Tables 1 and 2. Ninety-two percent of currently married males and 94% of currently married females had just one sexual partner in the last year. You can interpret this to say mean that marriage is a public health measure because it reduces the number of sex partners people have. Partner reduction has to be part of any sensible program to control the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
What interests me about this study is the competing definitions of homosexuality. It is difficult to pin down the commonly-held belief that 10% of the population is gay. Do we define homosexuality as attraction to persons of the same sex, or as same sex behaviors? Do we define a person as gay because the person defines themselves as gay? This study asked participants all these questions, and finds the same ambiguities as previous studies.
If we ask men how they describe their own sexual orientation, 90% describe themselves as heterosexual, 2.3% as homosexual, 1.8% as bisexual, with the remainder describing themselves as “something else” or not reporting. Do these numbers mean 2.3% are gay, or that only 90% are straight, with all others either gay or lying? We get a slightly different picture if we look at how people describe their sexual attraction. Of those who describe themselves as being attracted “only to the opposite sex,” only 94% describe themselves as heterosexual, with the largest portion of the remainder, 3.4% describing themselves as “something else.”
Behavior tells a still different picture. Six percent of men and 11% of women report ever having had any sexual contact with a same sex partner in their lifetime. However, in Table 17, we learn that only 2.9% of men have had any same sex partners in the last 12 months, while only 1.6% had exclusively same sex partners in the last 12 months. So who counts as gay?
The proper definition of gay depends on the question we are asking. The epidemiologists favor behavioral definitions, while psychologists look at sexual attraction. Political activists want to know how people define themselves. These are each legitimate questions, which generate different answers and different interpretations of what is important in the data.
Meanwhile, on the Left Coast the LA Times tells us what it found significant in the report. “Study finds big rise in female gay sex.” I rest my case.