LOS ANGELES — In celebration of Pride Month, xHamster did a deep dive into what its LGBTQ audience is viewing, and found a few interesting facts along the way.
According to a 2016 Gallup Poll, only 3.8 percent of Americans identify as LGBTQ, which closely matches the results of a survey of 11,000 xHamster visitors that revealed 4.06 percent of the site’s users self-identify as gay or lesbian.
“And yet, only 67.7 percent identified as straight,” said a company representative. “Maybe researchers are asking the wrong question. Or maybe people are just more open when a browser is set to incognito.”
“As we’ve noted before, 22.4 percent of respondents self-identified as bisexual and another 4.7 percent or so identified as ‘Other’ — all of which leaves a lot of wiggle room when the lights are out,” the representative added. “That’s nearly 33 percent of the population — much closer to the 37 percent [reporting] homosexual experiences identified by Kinsey in the 1940s.”
The representative noted that those who identified as “heterosexual or straight” weren’t being fully forthcoming, since the company broke out the viewing patterns of those who identified as “straight,” “gay” and “bi” separately, based on the viewer’s self-reported sexuality, asking each group about the content they commonly watch.
Of purely heterosexual respondents who report watching LGBTQ content, 4.22 percent watch gay male porn; 11.3 percent watch bisexual porn; 29.67 percent watch lesbian porn and 15.07 percent watch trans porn. Looking at men exclusively, the numbers are much the same, while women are more fluid in their sexuality.
Finally, it’s worth noting that gay men watch less lesbian content than straight men watch gay male content.
“No matter what people say about their sexuality, the data doesn’t lie,” said xHamster VP Alex Hawkins. “The survey shows that sexuality is a continuum and that ‘straightness’ and ‘gayness’ are constructs that don’t actually match up cleanly with sexual desire. But that’s the beauty of sex and porn — we allow people to explore beyond labels.”
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