Bisexuals have worse health than gays and lesbians, study says

Bisexuals tend to have worse health than gay men and lesbian women.

That’s according to researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas, who argue their findings could indicate that being a ‘minority within a minority’ leads to increased lifestyle pressures.

The new study ‘A New Piece of the Puzzle: Sexual Orientation, Gender and Physical Health Status’ – which examined the self-reported health of 10,128 LGB adults and 405,145 heterosexual adults – found that bisexuals tended to report poorer health and socioeconomic status.

The study found that 19.5 percent of bisexual men and 18.5 percent of bisexual women rated their health as “poor or fair” – the highest proportion among the groups surveyed. In contrast, only 11.9 percent of men identifying as gay and 10.6 percent of women identifying as lesbian rated their health as “poor or fair,” the lowest proportion of those surveyed.

Health was rated poor by 14.5 percent of heterosexual men and 15.6 percent of heterosexual women.

The study also found that bisexual respondents were less likely to be college educated or to earn more than $25,000 a year.

It also found they were bisexual men and women were more likely to smoke (23.8 percent and 21.9 percent respectively), compared with 14.9 percent of gay men, 16.6 percent of lesbian women, 11.1 percent of heterosexual men and 8.3 percent of heterosexual women.

“According to the Institute of Medicine, existing health research on the sexual minority population is sparse and typically does not make distinctions between the different types of sexual minorities,” said Bridget Gorman, a professor of sociology at Rice and the study’s lead author.

“We developed this study both to examine the health of these different sexual minority groups and to assess how risk factors for poor health contribute to their overall health.”

She added: “Our study illustrates the importance of examining health status among specific sexual minority groups, and not among ‘sexual minorities’ in the aggregate, since the health profile of bisexual adults differs substantially from that of gay and lesbian adults,” Gorman said.

Justin Denney, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research’s Urban Health Program and assistant professor of sociology at Rice, said of the study’s findings: “If bisexuals are minorities within the minority and experience unique and more extreme forms of discrimination, this might contribute to disparities in things like earnings, educational attainment, the propensity to smoke cigarettes and other factors that affect well-being.”

attitude.co.uk recently delved into the issue of bisexuality, with writer James Dawson penning an opinion piece on why it’s time to tackle biphobia within the LGBT community – read it here.

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