What is the life expectancy of gay guys?

Answer 1

It is exactly the same as the life expectancy of straight people. The following answers only deal with AIDS/HIV which actually infects more straight people than it does gay people. Most gay people do not have AIDS.

AIDS/HIV information, which has nothing to do with this question:

It is some years shorter than that of straight guys. Since the early 1980s:

• Large numbers of gay men are no longer dying of AIDS
• Straight men have also been exposed to the HIV virus
• Medicine (particularly protease inhibitors) has increased the life expectancy of HIV-positive men
• HIV-negative gay men tend to live longer than straight men
• Even with allowances for HIV, homosexual men die on average earlier than other men.

More Details:

A Canadian study, taken in the 1980s and early 1990s, when some gay men were contracting AIDS and dying, put the life expectancy of a 20 year old gay man in Vancouver as 8 to 21 years shorter than that of a straight man. Many religious groups tried to use this to prove that gay men's life expectancy was 49 years. They seized on this to justify continuing discrimination against gays.

In 2001 the authors of the Canadian study published a "Revisited" paper (see the link below) in which they were critical of the Religious Right's attempts to distort their findings. They said that if they repeated the study (in 2001) the figures would be "greatly improved".

In 2004, Harry Rosenberg, the mortality-statistics chief at the US National Center for Health Statistics, said he was unaware of any evidence that HIV-negative gays have a lower life expectancy than other males. He also suggested the HIV-negative gay male may actually live longer on average than the straight male. Gays may have higher incomes and more education on average than straights - two factors powerfully correlated with longer life spans.