Williams Institute Releases Report on DADT Estimating 66k LGBT Soldiers

One day before President Obama is being rumored to address the issue in his first State of the Union address, the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy released a report by Williams Distinguished Scholar Gary Gates, Ph.D. which estimates the number of openly LGBT people serving in the United States Armed Forces as well as the financial impact on eliminating Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Key findings from the report (pdf) include:

● An estimated 66,000 lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals are serving in the US military, accounting for approximately 2.2% of military personnel.

● Approximately 13,000 LGB people are serving on active duty (comprising 0.9% of all active duty personnel) while nearly 53,000 are serving in the guard and reserve forces (3.4%).

● While women comprise only about 14% of active duty personnel, they comprise more than 43% of LGB men and women serving on active duty.

● Lifting DADT restrictions could attract an estimated 36,700 men and women to active duty service and 12,000 more individuals to the guard and reserve.

● Since its inception in 1994, the “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” policy has cost the military between $290 million and more than a half a billion dollars.

● The military spends an estimated $22,000 to $43,000 per person to replace those discharged under DADT.

The Williams Institute is one of the most important sources of unbiased, excellent research on the LGBT community and I am happy to be a supporter of its work. I encourage you to do as well!

Predicting The Future Of Marriage Equality in the U.S.

A blogger by the name of Map Scroll has taken über-geek Nate Silver's soon-to-be famous post presenting a model predicting when a public vote on marriage equality will be favorable for the forces of equality and put it in the form of an easy-to-digest map of the United States.

Silver came to prominence with his shockingly accurate predictions in the 2008 election season and continues to provide fascinating examples of applying mathematics to what the general public generally believes are non-mathematical topics, such as whether anti-gay marriage ballot measures will pass or fail in the future:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:

1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;

2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;

3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

These variables collectively account for about three-quarters of the variance in the performance of marriage bans in different states. The model predicts, for example, that a marriage ban in California in 2008 would have passed with 52.1 percent of the vote, almost exactly the fraction actually received by Proposition 8.

Unsurprisingly, there is a very strong correspondence between the religiosity of a state and its propensity to ban gay marriage, with a particular "bonus" effect depending on the number of white evangelicals in the state.

Marriage bans, however, are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we'd project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year.

All of the other variables that I looked at -- race, education levels, party registration, etc. -- either did not appear to matter at all, or became redundant once we accounted for religiosity. Nor does it appear to make a significant difference whether the ban affected marriage only, or both marriage and civil unions.

This would tend to support the position of Love Honor Cherish and other grassroots marriage equality organizations about going back to Califonia voters in 2010 or waiting until 2012 to repeal Proposition 8. Most of the "grasstops" organizations like the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and (tacitly) Equality California and the National Center for Lesbian Rights seemed to endorse the later date at the recently Town Hall on Marriage Equality MadProfessah was invited to appear at last week.

My position is that we should go back to the ballot (in November 2010) and if we lose there be prepared to go back in November 2012 also.

Silver is good, but he isn't perfect. His attempt at predicting the Oscar results this year was pretty laughable.

Is Penis Size Associated With Sexual Health In MSM?

A new article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior entitled "The Association Between Penis Size and Sexual Health Among Men Who Have Sex with Men" explores the relationship between self-reported penis size and sexual health outcomes.

The abstract (academic summary of the article of "Cliff's Notes" version) reads:

Larger penis size has been equated with a symbol of power, stamina, masculinity, and social status. Yet, there has been little research among men who have sex with men assessing the association between penis size and social-sexual health. Survey data from a diverse sample of 1,065 men who have sex with men were used to explore the association between perceived penis size and a variety of psychosocial outcomes. Seven percent of men felt their penis was “below average,” 53.9% “average,” and 35.5% “above average.” Penis size was positively related to satisfaction with size and inversely related to lying about penis size (all ps < .01). Size was unrelated to condom use, frequency of sex partners, HIV status, or recent diagnoses of HBV, HCV, gonorrhea/Chlamydia/urinary tract infections, and syphilis. Men with above average penises were more likely to report HPV and HSV-2 (Fisher’s exact p ≤ .05). Men with below average penises were significantly more likely to identify as “bottoms” (anal receptive) and men with above average penises were significantly more likely to identify as “tops” (anal insertive). Finally, men with below average penises fared significantly worse than other men on three measures of psychosocial adjustment. Though most men felt their penis size was average, many fell outside this “norm.” The disproportionate number of viral skin-to-skin STIs (HSV-2 and HPV) suggest size may play a role in condom slippage/breakage. Further, size played a significant role in sexual positioning and psychosocial adjustment. These data highlight the need to better understand the real individual-level consequences of living in a penis-centered society.

I'm glad that the research was done, but the first person I told about this study said it could be improved if the researchers actually did the measuring instead of relying on self-reported dimensions, as men tend to exaggerate. Any volunteers? Do you think we live in a ``penis-centered world"?

Circumcision Ineffective In HIV Prevention in MSM

The latest research results about the impact of circumcision on HIV prevention have been released. You may recall the "to cut or not to cut" controversy earlier in the year when the head of the New York City health department floated the idea of adult male circumcision as a reasonable HIV prevention strategy, to much derision and dismay from AIDS activists. The new research shows that uncut guys can maybe uncross their legs now...

Despite research showing circumcision can reduce a man's risk of HIV during heterosexual intercourse, a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the procedure offers little protection against the virus for men who have sex with men, AFP/Yahoo! News reports. According to the study, there was minimal difference in HIV infections between those MSM who were circumcised and those who were not (AFP/Yahoo! News, 10/7).

For the study, researchers at CDC, led by Gregorio Millett, reviewed 15 previous studies on circumcision that included 53,567 MSM from Australia, Great Britain, Canada, India, the Netherlands, Peru, Taiwan and the U.S. Circumcised MSM were 14% less likely to be HIV-positive than those who were not, a rate that was not statistically significant, according to the researchers. Millett said, "You can't necessarily say with confidence that we're seeing a true effect there," adding, "Overall, we're not finding a protective effect associated with circumcision" for MSM (Dunham, Reuters, 10/7).

However, when examining studies carried out before the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy in 1996, the researchers found evidence that circumcision in the past had a protective effect for MSM, BBC News reports. The researchers said one explanation for the reduced effectiveness of circumcision among MSM following the introduction of HAART is that the efficacy of drugs diminished the perceived need to practice safer sex to avoid contracting HIV. In addition, the study noted that HAART might help reduce the risk of HIV transmission to a level that circumcision does not provide further benefits. The researchers also said that there may have been a smaller proportion of men in the pre-HAART trials who engaged primarily in receptive anal sex, which carries the greatest risk of HIV among MSM (BBC News, 10/7).

Virus That Causes AIDS May Be 100 Years Old

There's an interesting research finding published in Nature that HIV-1 Type M, the virus that causes most HIV and AIDS infections in the world, has been prevalent in human populations since at least 1908.

Worobey and his colleagues made the discovery while analyzing tissue samples collected between 1958 and 1960 from Kinshasa. One of them, acquired in 1960, contained bits of HIV-1 RNA, the virus's genetic material.

The researchers compared the 1960 virus with the oldest known HIV-1 strain, which was obtained in 1959 and evolved independently of the 1960 variant. They found that the 1960 version was significantly different.

Next the researchers constructed an evolutionary family tree of the HIV-1 virus, made up of both the 1959 and 1960 strains along with more than a hundred modern viral sequences.

Using a mathematical model, Worobey and his colleagues discovered that the 1960 strain must have been evolving for at least 40 years to account for the number of differences from the 1959 strain.

The model also traced the most recent common ancestor of both strains to 1908.

Oprah's Endorsement Worth A Million Votes For Obama

Kevin Drum has an interesting post about an article which attempts to quantify the impact of Oprah Winfrey's early endorsement of Barack Obama during the Democratic presidential primary campaign. Economist Professors at the University of Maryland Craig Garthwaite and Tim Moore in their paper "The Role of Celebrity Endorsements in Politics:
Oprah, Obama, and the 2008 Democratic Primary" (pdf), the authors assert that Oprah's early endorsement resulted in approximately 1 million votes for Obama.

Candidates in major political contests are commonly endorsed by other politicians, interest groups and celebrities. Prior to the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, a celebrity with a proven track record of influencing her fans’ commercial decisions. In this paper, we use geographic differences in subscriptions to O! – The Oprah Magazine and the sale of books Winfrey recommended as part of Oprah's Book Club to assess whether her endorsement affected the Primary outcomes. We find her endorsement had a positive effect on the votes Obama received, increased the overall voter participation rate, and increased the number of contributions received by
Obama. No connection is found between the measures of Oprah's influence and Obama's success in previous elections, nor with underlying local political preferences. Our results suggest that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for approximately 1,000,000 additional votes for Obama.

The Power of O, indeed!

CDC Revises U.S. HIV Annual Rate Sharply Upwards

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new report on HIV infections in the USA that indicated it has been under estimating the annual HIV incidence rate by nearly 40 percent for at least a decade.

AIDS activists were appalled that it took the CDC so long to publicly release these numbers when the data has been available (and leaked in AIDS public policy circles) since at least last November. The agency claims that it was waiting for the peer review process to be completed, and the report is published as a freely available article in a special issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The bad news:

Using sophisticated testing to identify new infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that there are about 56,300 new infections each year, not the 40,000 figure that has been gospel for so long.[emphasis added]

[...]

The new numbers do not mean that the epidemic is growing in this country, just that researchers have been able to provide more accurate estimates, said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention. He said the number of new infections has remained relatively constant since the late 1990s.

[...]

The new numbers "reveal that the U.S. epidemic is -- and has been -- worse than previously estimated and serve as a wake-up call for all Americans," said Richard Wolitski, acting director of the division of HIV/AIDS prevention at the national center.

In the latest UNAIDS report on the state of AIDS worldwide the latest U.S. data is not included. And California is not included in the latest U.S. data (although the CDC is extrapolating "sophisticatedly" to produce a national annual HIV incidence rate of 56,000) since the government agency refuses to include any data which is not based on names-based HIV surveillance data. As of 2006, that meant that the U.S. estimate is based on actual data from 22 states.

According to TowleRoad, both (Democratic and Republican) U.S. presidential candidates issued statements in response to the revised CDC data on HIV incidence rates in the United States.

Gay Boys Have Bigger Penises Than Straights?!

In light of gay marriages beginning on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times summarizes the scientific research that indicates which characteristics of humans seem to vary with sexual orientation in an article entitled "What does gay look like? Science keeps trying to figure that out." These are known as "sexual orientation correlates."

A brief summary of the research is:

These scientists are searching for innate traits that might not appear to be related to sexual orientation or even to standard clichés. So measuring a subject's shoe size is permissible; asking about ownership of Barbra Streisand albums would be cheating. Some inborn traits might be expected if homosexuality is -- as most scientists believe -- rooted in biology, and they might provide clues about the biological origins of sexual orientation.

[...]

Big brothers. Study after study -- including one of 87,000 British men published last year -- has found that gay men have more older brothers than straight men do. Only big brothers count. Lesbians don't show such patterns.

The numbers: Each older brother will increase a man's chances of being gay by 33%, says Ray Blanchard of the University of Toronto, an expert on the "big-brother effect." That's not as dramatic as it might sound. A man's chance of being gay is pretty low to begin with -- perhaps as low as 2% (lowered from 10% by researchers in the early 1990s). So having one older brother ups the chance to only about 2.6%.

[...]

Left hand vs. right hand. The hand you use to sign your name might have something to do with what gender you are drawn to.

The numbers: More lefties -- or at least more somewhat-ambidextrous folks -- crop up in the gay population than among straight people, several studies have shown. An analysis of more than 23,000 men and women from North America and Europe in 2000 found that being non-right-handed seems to increase a man's chances of being gay by about 34%, and a woman's by about 90%.

[...]

Hair whorl. How does your hair grow? This might reflect your sexual orientation.

The numbers: A 2004 study of nearly 500 men -- 272 on Delaware's Rehoboth Beach, popular with gay men, 200 on a beach without that reputation -- found that hair on the heads of men on the gay beach was 3.5 times more likely to grow in a counterclockwise direction. (Scalp hair typically resembles a clockwise-rotating typhoon.)

[...]

Penis size. If exposure to testosterone in the womb influences sexual orientation, scientists reckon that straight and gay people would differ in body parts strongly affected by testosterone, such as the penis.

The numbers: Anthony Bogaert of Brock University in Ontario and his colleagues re-analyzed data on 5,000 gay and straight men from sexologist Alfred Kinsey's famous files, collected from the 1930s to the 1960s. The results, published in 1999, showed that gay men had longer, thicker penises than did straight men: on average, about 6.5 inches long and 4.95 inches around when erect, versus 6.1 inches long and 4.8 inches around for straight men.

Hmmmm, since I have no experience with the penises of straight men, I can't really comment on this topic!

NY TIMES story that gay couples argue like straights

The New York Times has an article in today's paper ("Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage") which says that next week's impending commencement of same-sex marriages in California provides researchers with an excellent opportunity to study gender differences in long-term relationships. In fact, there has already been some research in this area, which the article summarizes:

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

[...]

One well-known study used mathematical modeling to decipher the interactions between committed gay couples. The results, published in two 2003 articles in The Journal of Homosexuality, showed that when same-sex couples argued, they tended to fight more fairly than heterosexual couples, making fewer verbal attacks and more of an effort to defuse the confrontation.

Controlling and hostile emotional tactics, like belligerence and domineering, were less common among gay couples.

Same-sex couples were also less likely to develop an elevated heartbeat and adrenaline surges during arguments. And straight couples were more likely to stay physically agitated after a conflict.

Study Says Mother-to-Child HIV Transmision Likely Eradicable

Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Reports has a report on a heartening study on Mother-to-Child Transmission (MTCT) of HIV which concludes the problem can be dramatically reduced and probably entirely eradicated. The study, entitled "Low rates of mother-to-child transmission of HIV following effective pregnancy interventions in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 2000-2006" appears in the May 11, 2008 issue of the academic journal AIDS.

For the study, Claire Townsend, research fellow at the University College London Institute of Child Health, and colleagues analyzed 5,151 pregnancies among HIV-positive women in the United Kingdom and Ireland between 2000 and 2006. The study found that the rate of MTCT decreased to 1.2% from 20% in the mid-1990s.

According to the researchers, the primary reason for the decline was the increase in prenatal HIV testing following the implementation of routine screening policies in the countries, BBC News reports. Routine screening increased diagnosis rates before delivery from about 70% in 2000 to about 95% in 2005, data showed (BBC News, 5/6). Routine screening policies were introduced in Ireland in 1999 and between 2000 and 2003 in the United Kingdom, the PA/Google.com reports.

Expanded access to antiretroviral treatment for HIV-positive pregnant women also was a factor, researchers said. The HIV transmission rate for women taking antiretroviral therapy for a minimum of two weeks prior to delivery was 0.8%, according to the study (PA/Google.com, 5/6). The rate was found regardless of the type of antiretrovirals the women received or whether they had vaginal births or cesarean sections, the study found.

Finally, some good news onthe HIV/AIDS research arena.

Test Your Gaydar!

Pam's House Blend is running a Gaydar Test in light of a recently published study which says that most people can identify correctly the sexual orientation of an individual 70 percent of the time after viewing a picture for 100 milliseconds.

Which of the two individuals above is gay? Mad Professah picked the guy on the right. Pam will give us the answer next week.

More Reports and Research On Uncircumsized Men and HIV

In Tuesday's New York Times there's an article ("Washing After Sex May Raise H.I.V. Risk") on a counter-intuitive result from a study on uncircumcised men in Uganda: immediate washing of the penis after vaginal sex increased the rate of HIV transmission from female to male sexual partners. A summary of the article by the invaluable Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report says:

For the study, Fredrick Makumbi of the Makerere University Institute of Public Health and colleagues examined 2,552 uncircumcised, HIV-negative men ages 15 to 29 in the Rakai district of Uganda. Eighty-three percent of the participants said they washed their penises with all sex partners, the Times reports. The researchers asked the men when and how they washed their penises -- including if they washed with or without cloths -- after sex at the beginning of the study and at six, 12 and 24 months after the study began. According to Ronald Gray, a study co-author and professor of population and family planning at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the researchers did not ask details about how the washing was conducted or if soap was used because of an oversight. Some soaps used in Africa are more irritating than soaps used in other places, according to the Times.

The researchers found that men who washed within three minutes after sex had a 2.3% risk of HIV infection, compared with a 0.4% risk among men who delayed washing for 10 minutes or more. Makumbi and other AIDS experts said they do not know why washing might increase vulnerability to HIV, but they offered some explanations. One is that delaying washing and prolonging exposure to vaginal secretions might reduce viral infectivity. Another explanation is that the acidity of vaginal secretions might impair the ability of HIV to survive on the penis, the Times reports. In addition, the use of water, which has a neutral pH, might prolong viral survival and possible infectivity, according to the Times. HIV likely needs to be in a fluid to cross the mucosa and infect cells, Gray said, adding that if HIV-infected fluid dries, its infectivity could decrease. Adding water, therefore, could resuspend HIV and increase its infectivity, the Times reports.

This follows news reports that Bush Administration is going to start allocating some of the funds in PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) to provide adult male circumcision in African countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Uganda where studies have shown tha male circumcision can reduce HIV transmission rates by as much as 60 per cent among heterosexuals. The Black AIDS Institute sent out a rare statement praising an initiative by the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, public health must begin to make people aware of the dramatic difference circumcision appears to make in HIV risk. In doing so, however, the Bush administration must respect the justified concerns both communities and individuals may present. Too many years of abuse at the hands of pseudoscience have left communities of color around the world distrustful of health officials. Any outsider- driven, top-down campaign urging men to have skin removed from their penises will no doubt deepen that skepticism.

So as the Bush administration gears up its response to the compelling data on circumcision, it will be well advised to help local leaders do the leading, which is something its AIDS program has proven reluctant to do in the past. That includes investing in raising the HIV-science literacy among local leaders and supporting culturally appropriate venues where communities can develop the tools needed to interpret the science.

At the same time, people of color around the world no longer have the luxury of allowing other folks' mistakes to hold us captive. If we're going to survive this epidemic, we must begin taking responsibility for our own lives. That means, no matter what the Bush administration does, and no matter what any local health department does here in the U.S., we must learn the facts about circumcision and HIV.

It is an entirely appropriate choice for any individual to opt against circumcision as a method of HIV prevention. But he must make that choice based on the facts, not as a self-defeating reaction to fears about government abuse.

Mad Professah has been following the ongoing debate(s) about HIV and circumcision quite closely and will continue to do so.

Checkers Is Solved

According to the Los Angeles Times, scientists at the University of Alberta have completely solved checkers. They have written a computer program which has enumerated all 500,995,484,682,338,672,639 possible board configurations and shown that with best play, the game of checkers is a draw. Their computer program, named Chinook, can not be defeated by any human player. Marion Tinsley, a mathematics professor who is widely regarded as the best checkers player who ever lived lost two games to Chinook, while only losing seven other games in a forty-five year career of competitive checkers.

Research Shows Hand Movements Aid Learning Mathematics

Mad Professah was alerted to this interesting article about the impact that using hand gestures during the teaching of mathematics. Post-doctoral fellow Susan Wagner Cook at the University of Rochester has published an article in the latest issue of Cognition which indicates that students who use hand gestures while doing math are three times more likely to remember what they've learned.

"We've known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a
conversation even when we're not entirely clear how that information relates
to what we're saying," says Susan Wagner Cook, lead author and postdoctoral
fellow at the University. "We asked if the reverse could be true; if
actively employing gestures when learning helps retain new information."

It turned out to have a more dramatic effect than Cook expected. In her
study, 90 percent of students who had learned algebraic concepts using gestures
remembered them three weeks later. Only 33 percent of speech-only students who
had learned the concept during instruction later retained the lesson. And
perhaps most astonishing of all, 90 percent of students who had learned by
gesture alone--no speech at all--recalled what they'd been taught.

Cook used a variation on a classic gesturing experiment. When third graders approach a two-sided algebra equation, such as "9+3+6=__+6" on a blackboard, they will likely try to solve it in the simple way they have always approached math
problems. They tend to think in terms of "the equal sign means put the answer
here," rather than thinking that the equal sign divides the problem into two
halves. As a result, children often completely ignore the final "+6."