I have previously determined that the semicolon is the gayest punctuation mark, ending decades of bloodshed and multigenerational feuds, but which letter of the alphabet is the gayest?  It’s a very important question.  If we want the New York state assembly to pass a gay marriage bill, or if we ever hope to overturn Prop 8, or if we could one day aspire to cure AIDS, it’s a question that must be answered.

Luckily for all of you gay rights-o-philes, I AM ON THE CASE.

I am statisticser than Nate Silver, so don’t question any of my methods, results, or conclusions. Everything I do is done correctly and perfectly, just like the rest of Science.

Methods

Using my facebook friends as a dataset, I categorized each of them into one of three categories: Gay, Straight Dude, or Straight Bitty.  “Gay” includes anyone who I know to consider themselves gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. They are lumped together for statistics’ sake, seeing as there are 13 Ls, Bs, or Ts in my friend list, or  1.3% of my friends. If you are a BLT, friend me so I can do better analyses!

Also, people that are not out and could very well be rounded up to gay are still considered straight until they sack up and come out.

My friend breakdown:

I then took data from all newsfeed items from the last ten days from each friend group.  (I of course excluded those goddamn quizzes that people are always fucking taking that are so fucking dumb, because I hide every single quiz that appears immediately. They are dumb and no one is interested in what color your chakra is, snore.  Gays are far and away the worst offenders per capita. In the past 10 days, my gay friends have taken 111 quizzes. Straight dudes took 23, which is approximately 6% the quiz-taking rate of gays. Straight bitties took 240 quizzes, which is half that of gays per capita, but still a veritable shit ton.)

Over 415,000 eligible characters (letters of the alphabet only, capital and lowercase not distinguished) were counted for the three groups and the frequency of each letter of the alphabet as proportion of letters utilized was calculated.  The comparative frequency of each letter was then compared across the three groups.

Results

Comparative frequencies, shown as a proportion, i.e. (percentage of letters that are As for gay people)/(percentage of letters that are As for straight bitties).

In this Tower of Hanoi of a data table, letters for which the numerator group was at least 5% more than the denominator are bolded for convenience, and italicized and underlined when at least 5% less than the denominator. 5% as a cutoff point was an completely arbitrary decision.

*Gender effect

**Homosexuality effect

Conclusion

As with the punctuation mark analysis, for characters where there are differences, the differences seem to be either a product of homosexuality or gender, indicated by asterisks. For example, gay dudes and straight dudes both use the letter X about 20% more than the ladies, but gay people use the letter K about 10% less often than straight people.

The gayest letter is by far the letter Q, which is not surprising, since the words ‘queer’ and ‘queen’ both start with Q. Additionally, to nobody’s surprise, X is the manliest letter, considering words such as ‘extreme’ and ‘Vin Diesel’ start with that letter.  K is the straightest letter, you hooded ghost-looking bastards. No letter is particularly feminine. The closest thing to a feminine letter is Y, which stands for ‘yucky’.

[For all previous gaynalyses, click here]