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. 

***

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.

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]

Carol Waseleski’s unexpectedly diverting paper, Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication, found that women used more exclamation marks than men. But why was this?…[Waseleski] concluded that exclamation marks were not just marks of excitability but of friendliness, and suggested that one reason women use them more than men is because they were, as a gender, less likely to be socially inept, funless egotists …

You can find the complete study on exclamations here!  Waseleski’s paper is more about the emotions exclamation points are used to express than about which gender uses them more, although she does mention that women used significantly more exclamatory phrases than men – 73% of exclamations, with 68% of the data analyzed written by women.  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t mildly fascinated by the study.

This, of course, inspired me to do another Facebook Gaynalysis on punctuation mark usage! So on Sunday night, after my mom left, I went through 1999 facebook status updates – 529 from gay people, 513 from straight dudes, and 957 from straight bitties – to determine the three groups’ relative utilization of various punctuation marks. Ctrl+F is a godsend.

As I’ve mentioned before, out of my 955 friends, 104 are gay (only 6 of these are ladies), 338 are straight men, and 513 are straight ladies.

The metric I decided to use was the ratio of uses of a punctuation mark per word, inspired by Ellmore Leonards‘ assertion that a writer should not use more than two or three exclamation point per 100,000 words.  My facebook friends clearly do not heed that advice, employing about 11,500 exclamation points per 100,000 words.

In case you were curious, the average length in words of status updates are 11.4 for gays, 11.2 for women, and 10.3 for straight men.

All of the graphs and other data are after the jump!

For the three groups combined, in order of most utilized to least utilized, I found it the following:

Punctuation	Number observed
Full Stop.	7321
Exclamation Point!	2444
Comma,	1740
Dash-	896
Question Mark?	798
“Quotation Mark”	501
(Open Parenthesis	209
Close Parenthesis)	361
Ampersand&	68
*Asteisk	53
Semicolon;	45

This first graph shows the relative usage patterns of the different punctuation marks I looked at. You can click on the image to view it larger in a new window. 

Yes, I realize I forgot to analyze colons.  I had already done all the data analysis, and the data is already gone.  Plus, this isn’t a real study.  My hypothesis would be that gays like colons best if I had analyzed colons.

Ding.

I also left out #’s and @’s, since Twitter corrupts that data.  I hate Twitter. Any other punctuation mark had less than 10 occurrences.

You can look through this flickr set to get a better idea about relative uses of gays, dudes, and bitties for each punctuation mark, as well as total punctuation per word. It’s basically zooming in on the data in the first graph.

Lots of fun conclusions to make!:

• Gays are more inquisitive than straight people!

• Straight dudes are too lazy to type all three letters of the word “and”!

• Straight ladies hate commas and only write run-on sentences!

And here’s the data presented another way, which is as a relative proportion compared to gays, computed by dividing the punctuation per word by gays’ punctuation per word.  This is a better way of looking at comparing the utilization of different punctuation marks since it’s a ratio and not unrelated frequencies.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “Wait, Steve! There are way more close parentheses than open parentheses!!”

You’re right! This discrepancy is due to smiley emoticons (there were no sad emoticons, strangely… apparently I have happy friends).  So here’s a graph that shows the proportion of the time that a close parenthesis is used as an emoticon – a third of the time for ladies, about one time in five for straight dudes:

Would you ever had guessed that straight dudes use (slightly) more smiley faces than gays? 

I don’t know about you people, but I find these results to be pretty fascinating.  From personal experience, I’ve always just intuited that gay brains are basically the midpoint of straight dudes’ and bitties’ brains, especially in terms of emotional processing.  In light of Waseleski’s paper, I find it particularly interesting that gays and ladies use the same amount of exclamation points, which is more than straight men. Contrast that to the findings that gays and straight dudes use similar amounts of emoticons, and you see some evidence for what I’ve thought all along.

Is there anything in particular that sticks out to you?  I’m mostly going to enjoy calling my straight male friends gay for using semicolons from now on.

Long answer: Read on.

Facebook only allows you to view the past 7 days, so here’s the Google Trends graph for “swine flu” as a search term to keep in mind while looking at the data; the red line is where data collection begins:

How I did this gaynalysis

Using facebook’s friend filter, I classified all of my friends into one of three friend lists: Gay, Straight Dude, or Straight Bitty. The “Gay” category includes anyone who I know identifies as any letter of the LGBTQQI2S alphabet soup for convenience’s sake.

Friend breakdown is thus:

I then expanded my newsfeed to its maximum, which is seven days, and counted each the total entries and entries that mention swine flu in some form for each friend list.

In the past 7 days, there have been 59 items in my newsfeed mentioning swine flu, out of 1999 total items. Sixteen mentions were by gay people, 23 by straight dudes, and 20 by straight bitties.

Relative Likelihood of Talking about Swine Flu

Here is the data on the relative likelihood of mentioning swine flu on Facebook.  

The Gayness Ratio is simply a measure of comparative over- or underrepresentation, and is the ratio of the (percentage of swine flu mentions) to (percent of that population).  Looking at the raw data, gay people were 2.5 times more likely to mention swine flu than the average – 27% of swine flu mentions were by gay people, while only 10.9% of my Facebook friends are gay. However, I have previously shown that gay people use Facebook more than straight people – 50% more gay people have updated their status in the past 24 hours, and we update it 2.25 times more than would be expected.

The “adjusted” figures in the above graph somewhat take this into account.

As an approximation, I used the previously calculated Gayness Ratio of status updates to adjust the raw data to correct for the fact that gay people are more likely to mention anything on Facebook due to their overuse of it. I chose status updates since the majority of swine flu mentions were via status updates. I divided the raw Gayness Ratios of mentioning swine flu by the status update Gayness Ratio, resulting in a less impressive difference – gay people were only 11% more likely than straight people to mention swine flu in relation to how damn much we use Facebook.

The above graphs further break the data down to compare the relative likelihood of mentioning swine flu of gays to straight dudes and bitties.

Each graph excludes either straight dudes or straight bitties, respectively.

Gays were 2.26 times more likely to mention swine flu than straight men and 4 times more likely to mention it than straight women.  (The Gayness Ratio is in comparison to the average, so divide them to get relative likelihood.) However, I couldn’t adjust this data because the previous gaynalysis did not break down by gender.

The above graph provides the best visualization of swine flu mentions by describing the percentages of newsfeed items that contain references to swine flu.  Because of differences in Facebook utilization, just discrete mentions of swine flu are misleading.  Over the past 7 days, 3% of all of my newsfeed items mentioned swine flu.  In comparison, 3% of gay newsfeed items mentioned swine flu, 4.5% of straight dude newsfeed items mentioned swine flu, and 2% of straight bitty items mentioned swine flu. 

Conclusion

Straight dudes care about swine flu 50% more than gays do and 214% more than bitties do – it’s just that bitties and gays don’t shut up on facebook, so it seems like gays love swine flu more than anyone else.

Here’s a statistical analysis of this activity.  Be forewarned: this is real science. Prepare yourself accordingly.

Figure 1. Number of newsfeed items referencing Bea Arthur’s death, 48 hrs following death

Twelve gay people have mentioned Bea Arthur’s death on Facebook, while only 8 straight people have done so. Of course, I have many more straight friends than gay friends, so it is necessary to describe the disproportionate gay response more descriptively. 

Figure 2. Gayness ratio of mentioning Bea Arthur’s death on Facebook.  The gayness ratio is a measure of overrepresentation and is calculated by dividing the percentage of items posted by a group divided by that group’s percentage of the total.  A value of 1 would indicate representative distribution.  The figure below shows that a gay person was 6.32 times more likely to mention Bea Arthur’s death than an’average’ person and 14.36 times likelier to mention Bea Arthur than a straight person.

Figure 3. Gayness ratio of mentioning Bea Arthur’s death, males only.  Gay men were nearly ten times as likely to mention Bea Arthurs death on Facebook than an ‘average’ male, and 42 times likelier than a straight male to mention Bea Arthur.

No one should be surprised by any of these results.

Click here for more background and Facebook analysis.

h/t to Kyle for giving me the idea for this post

The new Facebook layout makes it pretty easy to collect data about groups of people. All I did was make a friends list called “Gays”, put all my friends that I know are LGBT in it (confirmed only), and then did some pretty easy number crunching.

My friend breakdown:

So yeah, I have a ton of friends.  It’s a big group of people, and clearly includes a large amount of people that I don’t interact with on a regular basis or have met just once or twice, as any Facebook friends list does. 

Before I looked at who did what, I looked at who did anything. 

Here’s the data in graphical form:

Almost 60% of my gay friends updated their status at least once in the past 7 days, compared to 31% of my straight friends.  A third of my gay friends made an alteration to their profile at least once in the past 7 days compared to about 1 in 5 of my straight friends. So as you can see, more gays use Facebook more frequently than straighties.

Then I went through every item in my newsfeed from the past 10 days.  It looks like this:

“Other App” is overwhelmingly those wicked annoying quizzes.  Everyone needs to stop doing those. 

Also, Facebook puts up multiple items when you post a new photo album, so each photo data point is one new photo album and does not include “blank was tagged in x”.

I considered each chunk of links shared on Google Reader or other RSS aggregator to be one data point.

I then used these data to compute a Gayness Ratio for each class, which is a measure of gay overrepresentation.  This value is the percent of items that were gay divided by the percentage of my friends that are gay.  So for Status Updates, the value is 2.58, because [24.5% of the status updates in my newsfeed were gay] divided by [9.5% of my friends are gay].  It basically means that the average status update is 2.58 times gayer than it should be if everyone updated their status equally.

Here’s all the things that you can do on Facebook with their Gayness Ratio from gayest to least gay:

Sharing a link is the gayest thing you can do on Facebook, while posting a photo is the straightest.  I expected “Other App” to be number one since those quizzes are so damn gay, but that was not the case.

My gut hypothesis about why gays are so happy posting to Facebook?  The coming out process necessitates that gay people share very intimate details about their life with a large amount of people, desensitizing (or enabling, depending on your interpretation) us to sharing other things easily too.  Relatedly, I also wouldn’t be surprised if it puts us a little higher on the narcissism scale either.

I don’t have a Twitter account, but I’m pretty sure you’d find very similar results.  In fact, I would expect the results to be more striking, because doing a quick guesstimation off the top of my head, I’d say that 80% of the people that I know that use Twitter are gay. 

Additionally, after combing through over 2000 newsfeed items, I can almost assure you this same data for straight bitties to straight quaids promises to be ridiculous.  Bitties be updating for real.