Survey: Only One In Four Porn Performers Identify As ‘Straight’

A new survey commissioned by the adult video sharing platform ManyVids shows that the porn industry is a haven for LGBTI performers—though the number who identify solely as “gay” is only two percent, according to a report by Gay Star News.   In the survey of 1,500 adult industry entertainers, the number calling themselves “gay” was roughly the same as in the general population, according to recent data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, which found that among all Americans 1.9 percent of men and 1.3 percent of women called themselves “homosexual, gay, or lesbian.” But the survey’s other findings about porn performer sexuality differ sharply from the overall American population, with 44 percent saying that they were “bisexual” and another 22 percent calling themselves “pansexual,” meaning that 68 percent (including those who identify as gay)—more than two out of every three—porn performers consider themselves member of the LGBTI community.  On the other hand, just 26 percent of the porn performers in the ManyVids survey called themselves “straight.” “Before jumping to conclusions that this representation seems disproportionate, we’ve taken into consideration that accurate assessments of sexual orientation are challenging to capture,” ManyVids said in a statement. The survey also showed that nearly eight of 10 performers, 78 percent, identify as female, with another eight percent saying that their gender was either “non-binary” or “fluid.” Only eight percent of the performers in the survey identified as male. According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 51 percent of Americans said that they were female, while 49 percent called themselves male. But the Kaiser survey did not ask about other gender categories beyond the traditional binary definition. In the CDC survey, only 5.5 percent of women in the general U.S. population, and two percent of men said that they were bisexual, but those numbers were up from the previous CDC study, showing that bisexuality, or at least the willingness to identify oneself as bisexual, is on the rise in the United States. In the ManyVids survey, straight-identifying performers tended to be older than those who said they were bisexual or pansexual. The average age of bisexual performers was 29 years old, and pansexual performers were 27 on average. But those who identified as straight were 32 years old. Photo By Telnet / Wikimedia Commons