Predicting adolescent sexual behavior by sexual identity and sexual attraction

Background: Understanding how sexual attraction, behavior, and sexual orientation relate to each other in adolescence is critical to ensure that appropriate tailoring and targeting of healthy sexuality programs is being done.

Methods: A national survey of 5,542 13-18 year olds, with an oversample of LGBT youth, was conducted online. Data were weighted to approximate a representative adolescent sample. For the purposes of this paper, transgender youth were not included in the analysis.

Results: Ninety four percent of youth identified as heterosexual, 1.3% as gay, 0.6% as lesbian, and 3.1% as bisexual. For the majority of youth, sexual identity was consistent with attraction. However, 5% of heterosexual females and 1.6% of heterosexual males reported some attraction to the same gender. Similar findings were noted for sexual activity: 2.4% of heterosexual females and 3.6% of heterosexual males reported having vaginal or anal sex with someone of the same gender. Among gay and lesbian adolescents, lesbian youth were more likely than gay youth (60% vs. 3%) to report having recent sexual experience with a partner of the opposite gender.

Conclusions: Although sexual identity is consistent with attraction and behavior in most cases, important contradictions are noted also. Given the varying overlap across attraction, behavior and sexual identity, healthy sexuality programs should be mindful not to conflate behavior (i.e., MSM) with sexual identity (i.e., gay, bisexual, or queer).