I have heard the claim that being gay presents some health risks; are there any reliable studies that prove this? And, if this is true, can life insurance companies demand higher premiums for gay clients?
Interesting question, along the lines of “being married adds 4* years, on average… etc.” Can insurance companies give rate cuts to people who get married?
I guess one issue is getting reliable data since some are openly gay and others are not.
*I made up the 4 year thing. I don’t know the real number.
I don’t think it’s being gay, exactly, that shortens your life. I think it’s the whole, “Being disowned by your family, shunned by your friends, fired from your job, and villainized by the popular culture,” thing that shortens your life. If you’re lucky enough to be gay and avoid all that, I don’t think it will have much effect on your lifespan one way or the other.
I’ve actually heard that bisexuals have a slightly longer life expectancy. But I have no stats for that.
I wouldn’t be surprised if being gay appears to shorten your life expectancy in the US, but I doubt you’ll see the same effect if you correct for HIV infection rates.
Life insurance companies could most likely charge higher premiums to gay people–after all, gender is a protected class but auto insurance companies can charge higher prices to young men–but it’s not necessarily in their best interests to do so. Suppose that a naive life insurance company decides that it will charge a higher premium to its gay customers, and requires everyone to report their orientation. If it becomes public knowledge that gay customers pay higher premiums, there’s a strong incentive for everyone to claim that they’re straight. If the company takes orientation claims at face value, they’ll end up systematically underestimating their expenses.
And even if they manage to correct for incorrect information they’re given, that sort of policy is going to be highly controversial. Financial services firms tend not to like being at the center of controversies, so that’s another disincentive for them to implement this sort of pricing structure.
Best to sort out what “gay” means; even then, you’d have to know what definition your researchers used. “Identifies as gay”? “Man who has sex with men”? Man who has sex with men but sometimes with women"? “Man who has some kinds of sex with men that aren’t comparable to having the same kind of sex [e.g., anal] with women”? “Woman who has sex with women”?
Oo, that’d be nice.
I don’t know about that. You’re 90 years old-and there’s twice as many people you can’t have sex with anymore. 
I can’t offer a real answer but at one point, gay males, especially older ones in New Orleans were my main friends. They tended to engage in all kinds of risky things from rampant unprotected sex, to drug use, to drinking and driving completely loaded. I was (and am not) very much not gay but I still found their overall lifestyle pretty thrilling and interesting. New Orleans isn’t typical of the rest of the country and the people I knew were delinquents in their own way (although some were rather famous) but I hear similar stories coming from the rest of the country. They know that lots of people consider them deviants so they can go even more deviant in different directions once unleashed.
We have some lesbian friends now and they are pretty boring and just work out and go to fairs and things. I can’t see those being big risk factors.
Is life really worth living without being able to enjoy beautiful women? As a proud carrier of the Y chromosome, I don’t think so. Then again, that’s my VERY biased opinion.
Yeah, it’s unlikely that “being gay” is, per se, going to shorten your lifespan. However, if you look at gays, as a group, it would not surprise me if we saw shorter lifespans on average. Gays have a higher rate of suicide than straights, so that’s going to skew the data right there. And to the extent that gays have to live marginalized, that is going to encourage risky (or not healthy) behaviors like drug use, etc. OTOH, in areas like SF where gays are fairly well accepted, and are generally in a higher income group than their straight peers, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had longer life expectancies-- again for reasons only indirectly related to being gay.
Not really germaine to the conversation is it?
This sounds like a “study” by the notorious and defrocked “psychologist” Paul Cameron did way back in 1994. Their methodology was laughable and the study is considered to be junk by actual psychologists (not to mention statisticians).
“You have not lived until you have brought another man to climax using only your lips and tongue.”
– Strom Thurmond
That was an Onion story I could have lived without. Where’s the pukey smiley?
.
Oh, man. I read that and by the text I thought I was reading the Times or a legit news story. I didn’t realize it was the Onion. 
I remember reading an online article (I can’t recall what site) that explained why the data seemed so skewed.
Gay men seemed to die much younger on average because generally the older someone was, the less likely they were to admit to being gay in the first place.
This was due to the fact that they and their age-peers grew up in a time when being homosexual was not acceptable so they kept it hidden and continued to keep it hidden so as not to be alienated by their peers or have to deal with the hassle of “coming out”.
If the gays who do live to a ripe old age aren’t included then naturally the results will be seriously distorted.
If the OP is talking about the Paul Cameron “study”, it’s more than that. Cameron and his colleagues were gathering data by reading obituaries published in local gay newspapers. The methodology there is incredibly boneheaded. Gay newspapers only publish obituaries if:
a) The deceased is famous (even if only locally) and openly gay.
b) The deceased’s family has requested them to do so.
In addition, for a long time, the majority of obituaries in gay newspapers have been for people who’ve died of complications due to AIDS, which brings its own set of inaccuracies to the mix. They had a shockingly unrepresentative dataset and acted as if it were comprehensive.
The study is junk, period.
And since bars are often centers of gay socializing, alcohol consumption and alcoholism tend to be higher as well.
I suppose a cite or two would not be amiss, not that it will accomplish much.
Regards,
Shodan
As well as the whole “stupidly engaging in reckless sexual behavior such as extreme promiscuity and unprotected anal sex with strangers” thing.