I used anonymous, aggregate data from Google. (Women search, too, but in much smaller numbers.) The advantage of this data source, of course, is that most men are making these searches in private. While tolerant states have a slightly higher percentage of these searches, roughly 5 percent of pornographic searches are looking for depictions of gay men in all states. This again suggests that there are just about as many gay men in less tolerant states as there are anywhere else.
Since less tolerant states have similar percentages of gay men but far fewer openly gay men, there is a clear relationship between tolerance and openness. My preliminary research indicates that for every 20 percentage points of support for gay marriage about one-and-a-half times as many men from that state will identify openly as gay on Facebook. In a perfectly tolerant world, my model estimates that about 5 percent of men in the United States would say they were interested in men.
Note that this matches nicely with the evidence from pornographic search data. These results suggest that the closet remains a major factor in American life.
