Why Are People Obsessed with How LGBTQ People Have Sex?

Nosy Much

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

If you ask any member of the LGBTQ community, whether they are homosexual, transgender, or fall under any of the other queer umbrellas, what question they get asked the most, invariably it will be something related to how they have sex.

A study released in 2014 in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, titled Female Economic Dependence and the Morality of Promiscuity focused on cisgender, heterosexual (cishet for short) sexual behavior but does provide one possible clue. Humans may be wired to be nosy about other people’s sexual behavior, especially when it comes to promiscuity, in order to ensure paternal certainty. Paternal certainty among heterosexual couples can ensure fathers are more likely to provide and help rear offspring.

Societal pressure can come to bear in order to improve the chances of who a child’s father is, making sure they remain to care for their own child. This has shown to be an evolutionary advantage among humans, as human males are generally more involved in child rearing than most other species.

Yes, there may actually be a hard-wired evolutionary reason why humans like to pry into their neighbor’s sex lives. Reproduction is a biological imperative, even if not all humans share the same desire to procreate. However, bringing morality to bear to ensure paternal certainty seems to have led people to be a little bit too judgmental in regard to other people’s sex lives.

Unfortunately, there is a lack of studies looking into the evolutionary reasons behind why humans also seem to question and judge LGBTQ sexual behavior. However, I speculate that the same evolutionary drive that makes us want to poke our noses into heterosexual couple’s sex lives, also drives us to wonder what’s happening between the sheets of LGBTQ relationships as well. Since promiscuity has long been seen as sexual deviance, and still is by certain groups, then it stands to reason that any sort of sexual deviance is fodder for speculation and judgement.

Even so, despite people’s burning desire to know what and how LGBTQ people have sex, is it at all appropriate for them to poke their noses into our sex lives? Not at all. The fact that people will bluntly ask ‘how do you have sex?’ to anyone who enters a…