Noodles and Beef

I’m really sorry for the frankness of that last blog post, but let’s be clear:

Gay men aren’t just shallow in Kentucky, Gay men are just shallow.

I haven’t really touched this topic because I have strong personal bias after being burned by people in the gay community for not meeting their superficial expectations; I have been turned down a lot because I’m too dark, skinny, short, not kinky enough, or too young.  If they did find me attractive, they wouldn’t even befriend me unless we had sex first.  (This might be why I have so few friends).

Just how shallow are gay men?

Only 10% of the census respondents said that looks don’t matter, the other 90% had strong preferences towards certain cliques.  When I put this data into a matrix, we see that people who associate with a clique are mostly into other people in that clique.  (Eg, if you identify as a Bear you are probably only into other Bears).

I wanted to know more about the 10% of gay men who didn’t care about looks, so I ran the numbers as if these men were their own clique…a clique that didn’t care about looks.  We’ll call them turtles, after the animal that picks a mate for their personality.

Turtles are physically very average, though they are more likely to be bottoms.  Geographically speaking, gays in the Mid-west care less about looks than the rest of America.  However, the biggest indicator that someone doesn’t care about looks is if they don’t identify with any cliques.  Nearly one-in-three people who doesn’t identify with a clique don’t care about looks.

Yes, there are people out there that don’t care about looks.  

But don’t worry about trying to find gay men who don’t care about looks; You should follow your passions instead of other people.  Do the things you love to do and you’ll attract meaningful friends and relationships who share those interests. (This is the best advice I’ve ever given).

The above graph charts relative attraction against the range of body densities grouped by their average gay cliques. The data is from my Gay Cliques Census.

Chubs are one of the least sought after groups, with less than 10% of survey respondents saying they were into Chubs. The only people who are into Chubs are Chasers, Gainers, and other Chubs.

As you can see in the chart above, interest in Chubs is highest towards the fattier (or less dense) end of the body type spectrum, with interest declining as the suitors’ bodyfat decreases.

I’ve included Muscle Bears (the most desired clique) for comparison. Interest in Muscle Bears is pretty consistent, but steadily increases the less bodyfat you have…until you get to Bulls (but thats because Bulls seem to go after younger, smaller guys and they skewed the data).

I’m just guessing, but let’s say that the Muscle Pup, Gym Bunny, Gym Rat, and Muscle Bear cliques is when folks start looking like bodybuilders. If this is the case, then ~2% of respondents with Bodybuilder stats are into Chubs, or one-in-fifty bodybuilders are into Chubs.

I assume you’re asking about the visualisations for my Gay Cliques Census?  I originally collected data using Google Doc’s form tool, which also produced live graphs based on results of the survey.  Unfortunately, Google Spreadsheets have a slew of limitations (including some very short spreadsheet sizes), so I wrote my own survey tool which saves information to a MySQL database.  MySQL is much more powerful than Google Docs and has many statistical functions built in.

So I did most of the math with MySQL with some custom functions for Bayesian Classification I wrote myself.  These results are cached and refreshed every hour to spare my server load.

The graphs are generated using Google’s Chart API.  There are many graphing libraries out there, but this one is really simple and easy and I’ve used it in almost all my projects that need graphs. Highly recommended.

I’m aware that their are all-in-one suites of software that do the data analysis and display for you, but I am too much of a control freak to know anything about them.  Hence why I wrote my own analysis formulas.

I dislike cliques because I don’t fit into them and hate how the gay community is so exclusive to their respective social groups.

Remember when the Bear movement was all about bucking the trend of body fascism? I wish these “cliques” were more about identity and body-acceptance and less about exclusion and elitism.

Some folks (read: morons) feel that my survey has made segregation in the gay community worse, but I feel it’s simply turned a mirror on our own culture.  Look at the absurdity of 18+ different labels.  The only people who said “Looks don’t matter” are those who don’t align with any clique.

There weren’t too many surprises, but here’s what stood out to me:

• After 35, guys start to hone-in on what they want and become more exclusive to that type.
• There are just as many tops as their are bottoms…unless you segment by clique.  Twinks who are into other Twinks must have  a very hard time finding enough tops to go around.
• Gay guys don’t understand statistics.  (Something I discovered when I tried presenting the data by itself without commentary).
• There are regional distinctions between social groups.
• 1/5th of Gainers don’t have a sexual role
• The average muscle bear is a lot smaller than I imagined.

I had a few goals for the Gay Cliques Census:

• Define these social groups from popular consensus.
• Discover what cliques are actually in use (eg, Bears, Cubs, etc…) so we know what social groups don’t actually exist (eg, Lemurs, Moose, etc…).
• Find the relationship between cliques and attraction to other cliques.
• How do Tops/Bottoms range between groups.
• Annnnd what are the geographic differences between cliques.

So, basically, I just wanted to “shed some light” on the gay demo.