It is difficult to gauge people’s acceptance about same-sex sexualities, as responses to questionnaires are prone to social desirability bias. We offer a new proxy for understanding popular concern surrounding same-sex sexualities: prevalence of Google searches demonstrating concern over gay/lesbian sexual identities. Using Google Trends data, we find that Google searches about whether a specific person is gay or lesbian show patterned bias toward masculine searches, in that such searches are much more frequently conducted about boys and men compared with girls and women. We put these findings into context by comparing search frequencies with other popular Google searches about sexuality and otherwise. We put forth that the patterned bias toward masculine searches illustrates support for the enduring relationship between masculinity and heterosexuality and that it does so on a larger scale than previous research has been able to establish.

很难评估人们对同性性行为的接受程度，因为对问卷的回答容易引起社会期望偏差。我们提供了一个新的代理，用于理解围绕同性性行为的普遍关注：Google搜索的普遍性表明对同性恋的性认同感到关注。使用Google趋势数据，我们发现Google在搜索特定人是男同性恋还是女同性恋方面表现出对男性搜索的偏见，这是因为与男孩和女人相比，对男孩和男人的搜索更为频繁。我们通过将搜索频率与其他有关性爱及其他方面的热门Google搜索结果进行比较，将这些发现置于背景之中。