Oh my gosh you guys, did you hear that Michael Jackson died!? It was like a totally big deal – can you believe that 30% of tweets when he died were about him!? Unbelievable.  People all over the internet were really interested. He died so hard that he almost broke the internet.  (You guys already knew all this, you smarty pantses, you. I just needed an opening paragraph.  Set the scene and whatnot, maybe foreshadow a touch.)

The important question about his death, though, remains unanswered: What do gay people think about it?

Gay people are known to have very important opinions.  That’s a sentence that doesn’t even include a link because it’s so true I don’t even need to source it.

Three more things are true:

1. All celebrities are dead right now.
2. People talked about all celebrities being dead on Facebook.
3. Being concerned about the well-being of society like I am, I compiled some valuable (and possibly life-saving!) information about how concerned people were about dead celebrities.  Specifically, how gay people and straight people were concerned to varying degrees about dead celebrities.

For people not familiar with my Facebook Gaynalyses, here’s the procedure and methodology: I have all of my Facebook friends categorized into one of three friend lists – Gay People, Straight Dudes, and Straight Bitties.  If you are my Facebook friend, I have categorized you.  If you friend me, I will categorize you.  For each of the three groups of people, I counted all status updates between June 25 at 12:01 am until June 30 at 11:59 pm, as well as counted how many statuses mentioned Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays, or Ed McMahon and their respective deadnesses. Those are the only dead celebrities, apparently, that warranted mention by my friends Other dead celebrities, such as Steve McNair, earned either one or zero newsfeed appearances from June 25 until the time of this post, influencing both the study period and which dead celebrities were worthy of my scientific scrutiny.  Maybe you should have dangled some more babies out of windows, Steve.

Over the six-day study period, during which 1053 status updates appeared in my newsfeed, 15.4% of all Facebook status updates referred to celebrity death.  Gays and dudes were somewhat more interested in dead celebrities than their cats, fights with boyfriends, and shitty jobs than the ladies were, as you can see below in Figure 1.

Out of the four dead celebrities in question, Michael Jackson’s death had the most uniform appeal among all three study groups.

Straight dudes went comparatively crazy over Billy Mays’ death, probably because they’re all Neanderthals, and Mays dropped out of West Virginia University, kaboom, in typical straight dude fashion.

As for Farrah Fawcett – gays were basically the only ones who cared, because her spirit adjective is the word “fabulous”, making her an immediate favorite of the gays, or a gayvorite. Straight bitties were just jealous she looked so good, and straight dudes think of her looking like this, not this, so they all gave her the silent treatment, being the disrespectful bastards they are. 

Regarding Ed McMahon’s death, no one cared.  He started the wave of celebrideath, but he was only mentioned 6 times on Facebook, and every mention just appeared in a list of dead celebrities 3 days after he died, e.g. “Liz Taylor just sighed relief. Mcmahon fawcett Jackson. We all know these things come in threes [sic].” 

Wikipedia doesn’t call him the “greatest side kick of all time” for nothing.

Here’s a stacked bar graph to better visualize their relative popularity, as the data set is “statuses mentioning dead celebrities” instead of “statuses”.  Sure, this graph directly contradicts stuff I said before, but you haven’t been reading that closely, and also… Facebook. Let’s not get crazy, people. 

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So there you have it.  Everything you didn’t really care to know about dead celebrities and Facebook.  If you care to learn more about how gay people use Facebook in a slightly different manner than straight people, click here for some similar posts.   Also, none of these graphs come close to the time Bea Arthur died – gays went nuts. Out they minds. You can peep that here.