A value of 100 is the peak popularity for a term across this period. Each point in the graph represents the search interest relative to the highest point on the chart, corresponding to the United States in the 2007-2017 period. Notes: The gold line adds the monthly relative importance of “is my wife gay,” “is my wife lesbian,” and “is my wife a lesbian.” Google measures trends monthly. Below, we analyze Google Trends comparing searches for “Is my husband gay?” to “Is my wife gay?”, “Is my wife lesbian?”, and “Is my wife a lesbian?” for the same period in the United States. Next, we extend our Google search analysis from gay sons and daughters to analysis of Google searches for gay husbands or wives. Our analysis confirms that parental concern for gay sons is much higher than for gay daughters when restricting searches to the United States, and even after combining all three possible search term phrases for daughters.
We find that, after combining the three possible phrases for daughters (“Is my daughter gay/lesbian/a lesbian?”), Google searches for “Is my son gay?” are still about twice as common in July 2017, and they were about 5 times more common in January 2011, shortly after the movie Oy Vey! My Son is Gay was released. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular, relative to the peak, and a score of 0 means the term was less than 1% as popular as the peak.
Notes: The gold line adds the monthly relative importance of “is my daughter gay,” “is my daughter lesbian,” and “is my daughter a lesbian.” Google measures trends monthly. Thus, we repeated the analysis using all three phrases, “Is my daughter gay?” “Is my daughter lesbian?” and “Is my daughter a lesbian?” We combined their results to compare to “Is my son gay?” As shown below, we found that all three phrases combined are still less likely searches than “Is my son gay?” over the 2007-2017 period in the United States. We wondered if Bridges’ finding could be an artifact of the fact that searches about whether daughters were gay might be distributed across three potential wordings: asking whether the daughter is “gay,” “lesbian,” or “a lesbian.” In addition, we were interested in knowing how these results would look if restricted to searches in the United States. We extend what Bridges did to include more search terms, and to include concerns of whether people’s husbands or wives are gay as well. Specifically, he found that searches for “Is my son gay?” were 28 times more common than searches for “Is my son gifted?” He also found that there was a large gender disparity in asking Google about gay children people asked Google, “Is my son gay?” 4.7 times more than “Is my daughter gay?” Is My Son Gay?,” in which he also analyzed Google Trends but instead looked at how common Google searches were for “Is my son gay?” and “Is my daughter gay?” and compared them to searches for “Is my son gifted?” He found that people were much more likely to ask about children’s sexualities than any other quality mentioned in the New York Times piece. In general, Google searches about sons were more likely to be about intellect, stupidity and leadership, while Google searches for daughters were more likely to be about looks (i.e., whether their daughter is “beautiful” or “ugly”).īuilding off this article, Tristan Bridges wrote a 2017 post called “ Google, Tell Me. It also found that people ask Google whether their daughter is “overweight” much more than they do for their sons. Is My Son a Genius?” reported that people ask Google whether their sons are “gifted” at a rate 2.5 times higher than they do for their daughters. A 2014 New York Times story called “ Google, Tell me.