Once a month, this local paper comes out in grocery stores (its free) called Connection.
its a chrsitian paper, for sure.
They get most of their news from a place called AgapePress.
This one review for a book actually called The Homosexual Agenda (yes its a book!)
contends that the avergae life expectancy for gay males is 46, compared to hetero ones, which is something around 70.
This can’t be true.
Can someone check statistics for me.
How did they come up with this?
Anything is true, if you run it through enough statistics. Statistically speaking, more gay males die young from Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrom than hetero males…I don’t know if that statement is still accurate, but it was definately was back when it was first noticed.
The statistics taken back then alone would result in a lower mean average life expectancy than the mean average life expectancy of a straight male, I would think.
My inclination is that it’s probably a “valid statistic” – taking into account that over the past 30 years the AIDS virus hit the gay community more-or-less first and to a disparately high degree, that few straight men have been killed for being straight, etc. In other words, engage in promiscuous high-risk sex, use intravenous drugs, don’t exercise caution in your social life when you know there are people who hate you, and you’re likely to die young; do the opposite, and you’ll live a normal lifespan. One subset of gay men definitely fell into the first category, before we knew of the tragedy of AIDS. (Note that the statistics compare gay and straight men, not gay and straight people, where the relative safety of lesbians would not skew the figures so greatly.)
In short, a statistic can be massaged to say whatever you want it to, by tailoring how it’s presented and against what it’s compared. Did you realize that on 100% of all the planets in the Universe known to have intelligent life on them, there’s a Fred Phelps?
FYI, Agape Press is the pet house organ “news agency” of the “Reverend” Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, Don being the loyal American who regularly attempts to get TV shows banned because they don’t meet his standards of decency. His coverage of the election of the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson is notable for most errors per paragraph of anything I’ve ever seen – and that’s assuming he reported the quotes from his house weasels accurately.
Do you suppose a “Christian bookstore” that sells five copies of The Gay Agenda gets a toaster oven? 
Maybe we should order some copies, as Christmas presents for our gay men and women friends – whenever somebody posts reference to “the gay agenda” in GD or the Pit, they’re quick to ask what’s on it.
ha!
The book is reallt called the Homosexual Agenda.
I’d like to check it out(in my library, I only pay for cecil books).
But I got the impression that “statistic” was meant to show how horrible it is being gay (you die young!)
so…stop being gay!
And what do they make of Quentin Crisp? Wasn’t he quite old when he died?
What’s the life expectancy of lesbians? I’m betting it’s slightly longer than that of a married, hetrosexual female.
Everyone should get a copy of “The Homosexual Agenda” when they come out. Sort of like a Bar Mitzvah boy getting his fountain pen. What a shame, we old guys had to figure things out for ourselves; now there’s a how-to manual.
And Poly, that Fred Phelps statistic scares the bejesus out of me. Nightmares tonight, for sure!
I still doubt it. If the average age at untimely death of those gay males who die of things that straight males don’t is as low as 22, then fully half of gay males would have to be victims of AIDS death or homicide or something. This sounds ridiculous to me.
Here’s one study below widely referenced on the web.
Modelling the impact of HIV disease on mortality in gay and bisexual men.
Here’s a critique of another (somewhat infamous though widely cited at one time) study (not the one above) that projected gay mortality by counting obits in gay newpapers.
The Cameron Group’s “Gay Obituary” Study -Critique
Some additional commentary on the obit counting study.
Well, just one question: how did they decide who is gay and who is straight? Is it a question on the census? They probably decided that all AIDS sufferers were gay and all people who died otherwise were straight.
I wouldn’t take that as a given.
Granted, lesibians living as lesbians are less likely to be murdered by boyfriends, ex’s, and husbands (although former boyfriends and husbands have been known to attempt such with women who leave them for other women), but there are instances of hate-crimes directed towards lesbians. Women, including lesbian women, still tend to make less money than men of the same age, educations, etc. and poverty does not contribute to longevity (although some lesbians are wealthy, certainly not all are). And, like any minority, lesbians are subject to pressures those in the mainstream majority do not experience which may also negatively impact their health.
I do not have any statistics at hand, but knowing the above I have to wonder what, if any, difference there is between lesbians and het women.
Hate crime murders aren’t common enough to be a significant factor in the average age at death of any group. Please understand, I’m not saying that they don’t happen. They certainly do. But even the proportion of murders is only a small part of the average age of death for any group. Most people die of “natural causes,” i.e. heart attacks, strokes, cancer, pneumonia, etc. Murders, suicides, and accidents also are significant causes of death, but they are a distinctly smaller factor in the average age of death. There are differences for different groups in these categories, but it’s not always the direction that you’d think. Blacks are more likely to be murdered but less likely to commit suicide. In so far as there are differences between the average age at death between blacks and whites, it’s mostly due to blacks being less well off and having less access to good health care and nutrition.
Even to the extent that the rate of murders affects the average age at death, hate crimes are a small proportion of murders. You can get a skewed perspective of what most murders are about if you watch too much sensational news coverage. Most murders (65%, perhaps) are acquaintanceship murders: Husbands killing wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends. Wives killing husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends. Friends killing friends. Parents killing children. Children killing parents. About 30% of murders happen during the commission of another crime. The remaining 5% are the weird stuff - serial murders, killing sprees, hate crimes, etc.
I’m really dubious about the claim that gay men die, on average, thirty years earlier than heterosexual men. You would have to assume that sexually-transmitted disease kills most homosexual men. Can anyone find any source that gives a statistic that does not ultimately come from that Cameron study that gives an average age at death for homosexual men?
Not necessarily, Wendell. First off, we do know of a significantly-above-average suicide rate for gay men – to be sure, a minor factor, but one which can skew age calculations by a significant amount. Second, (and no flames, please – I’m not stereotyping here!) there is a group of gay men inclined to the club scene and what our forefathers would have called “a life of dissipation.” To suggest that this, continued into middle life, could reduce that group’s life expectancy, and that this might influence the average age of death for all gay men significantly, is probably a valid assumption. The group need not be inordinately large to do so – 10%-15% of gay men would produce a noticeable influence.
Too, this study probably assumes that the closeted gay man who is not particularly subject to the influences we’ve discussed in this thread is heterosexual – only out gay men would be counted as gay.
I hasten to reiterate that I am in no way making mock of gay men generally, à la the proverbial “gay lifestyle,” but taking rueful note of problems acknowledged to be health-affecting problems for some gay men.
And I too would like to see a number not based on that Cameron study.
Yeah, but the claim is that gay men have an average lifespan that’s thirty years less. A somewhat greater suicide rate and 10%to 15% of gay men being much more promiscuous and thus having more sexually transmitted disease wouldn’t be enough to lower the average age at death by 30 years. That would take most of gay men having some greatly increased risk factor.
The whole idea that Gay men die much younger than straight men is ridiculous… Those supposed statistics were obtained by reading obituaries in Gay newspapers when AIDS first hit… and averaging out the age…
I’m sure there are many Gay people who died at an older age who would not have put an obituary in a Gay paper if they weren’t out yet… and there were MANY Gay people not out 20 years ago…
The whole idea that the life expectancy is lower because there are some Gay men into the Club Scene is ridiculous… There are alot of straight people who go to bars, drink and take ecstasy too… Every time I go past trendy straight bars in San Francisco, there seem to be huge numbers of straight people trying to get in… I think that the Club Scene in general is an age thing - not a Gay/Straight thing…
I don’t think you’re going to see alot of 40 year old Gay men involved in the Club Scene… Most of us grew out of that a long time ago… Check out the Home Depot any weekend in any city with an appreciable number of Gay men and you’ll probably find all those over 40 Gay men you’re looking for
Survivor
Well, I know that there have been studies (no idea how accurate those studies are) which have indicated that women who don’t get married, tend to live longer than women who do get married (while the opposite is true of males), so it seems plausible to me, that if a single woman outlives a married woman, then a lesbian could outlive a married woman.
I’d have guessed that the largest risk that heterosexual and married women are more likely to run is childbirth. I’ve no idea how signiificant the difference would be though (especially in the US today)
The problem with calculating a rate per population with a group like “gay men” is that nobody really knows how many there are. So there is no denominator. One could estimate using unmarried men, but it wouldn’t be accurate. There is no question that HIV did (and still does) hit that population hard.
I read somewhere that lesbians, because they don’t need family planning/birth control, aren’t as likely to see gynecologists for preventive care and screenings as straight women are. So they may be more likely to have cervical cancer or even breast cancer progress before being caught. On the other hand, cervical cancer is associated with human papilloma virus which is sexually transmitted, and my guess is that fewer lesbians are infected with HPV than straight women. But all of this is conjecture. AIDS, though - unless they shoot up drugs - is extremely rare in lesbians.