Sexual Orientation and HIV Diagnoses Rates

Breading down the number of HIV cases in the nation by individuals of the same sexuality reveals that HIV diagnoses now come mostly from male heterosexuals. Aligning with the CDC’s surveillance, men were separated based on sexual activity that classified them as homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, while all women were grouped together. On the national scale, we see that male homosexuals made up the plurality of HIV cases from 1981 until 1996, at which point male heterosexuals made up the plurality of HIV cases. Male homosexuals are still the most affected group by percentage, given that they consist of about 2% of the male population yet account for a large share of all HIV cases, yet this transition from HIV being a mostly gay issue shifted on the national scale in 1996. Around 2002, females infected with HIV almost numbered the number of new diagnoses in the male homosexual population, suggesting that in the twenty-first century, HIV is very much becoming a heterosexual issue as well. 

In 1993, across all groups and the national total, there was a drastic decline in HIV diagnoses rates. The decrease in incidence is due to a number of policies from the Clinton administration and popular figures revealing their HIV status, all of which lead to the public's increased awareness of HIV as also a non-gay issue. I wanted to see how these policies--many of which dealt with condom use--affected the various groups in terms of lowering the number of diagnoses per year. As can be seen in the following graph, male homosexuals were the most impacted by these policies, followed by male heterosexuals, then male bisexuals. This tremendous decrease for male homosexuals hints that these policies played the largest role in reducing the rate for male homosexual practices, given that many of the policies had to do with advocating condom use which would have the biggest role in reducing male homosexual practices which are the most high-risk for HIV transmission.

Given that in my earlier analyses of race, Black individuals began to account for the plurality of HIV diagnoses around 1995 and, looking at the sexuality graphs in which heterosexuals began to account for the plurality of HIV diagnoses at a similar time, I began to suspect that perhaps male heterosexuals in the Black community were accounting for this change. 

As suspected, the Black community’s heterosexual men and women are the ones most affected by HIV which explains why, as Black individuals begin to make up the plurality of HIV diagnoses, so too would heterosexual men. From this data we can also see that only in the White community do male homosexuals still make up the plurality of HIV diagnoses, suggesting that in communities of color, people are either facing a stigma to come out as homosexual so some actually homosexual men who are diagnoses may fall in to the male heterosexual category or that in communities of color, HIV transmission is higher between heterosexual people because of less safe sex practices, perhaps due to comparative lack of awareness of HIV or comparative lack of access to condoms.

I also wanted to check for any differences in sexuality in the various regions, which showed that only in the West do male homosexuals make up the plurality of HIV diagnoses, with the South and Northeast predominantly dominated by heterosexual men and females. Given the high proportion of Black people in the South and Northeast, this could explain why in these regions heterosexual people make up the plurality of their HIV diagnoses since high rates of heterosexual diagnoses are prominent in the Black community. 

Datasets Accessed

HIV/AIDS Data 1981-2002: Sexual Orientation, Region, Race

US Department of Health and Human Services (US DHHS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention (NCHSTP), AIDS Public Information Data Set (APIDS) US Surveillance Data for 1981-2002, CDC WONDER On-line Database, December 2005.