Sexual Orientation, Sexual Attraction, and Income

Abstract

We provide new evidence on sexual orientation, sexual attraction, and income using data from the 2015–2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). These data ask individuals about both orientation and attraction, allowing us to describe a sexual minority group that has been hidden in prior research: people who identify as heterosexual but who concurrently report some same-sex attraction. We show that this population is much larger than the sample of self-identified gay, lesbian, or bisexual people, and we show that relative to heterosexual people who report exclusively different-sex attraction, heterosexual people who report some same-sex attraction are younger, less likely to be married, and much more highly educated. We document that, controlling for observables, heterosexual men who report same-sex attraction experience robust and statistically significant employment and income penalties relative to heterosexual men who are exclusively different-sex attracted. These penalties are larger for non-Hispanic White men than for non-Hispanic Black men. We find no similar penalty for heterosexual women who report same-sex attraction. Our results indicate that prior research has overlooked one of the largest groups of sexual minorities—heterosexual people who report some same-sex attraction—who experience systematically different economic outcomes than heterosexual individuals who are exclusively different-sex attracted.