Sexual minority status and self-rated health: the importance of socioeconomic status, age, and sex.

OBJECTIVES

I examined how sexual minority status, as indicated by sex of sexual partners, is associated with self-rated health and how socioeconomic status suppresses and age and sex moderate this association.

METHODS

I used multinomial logistic regression to analyze aggregated data from the 1991 to 2010 General Social Survey, a population-based data set (n = 13,480).

RESULTS

Respondents with only different-sex partners or with any same-sex partners reported similar levels of health. With socioeconomic status added to the model, respondents with any same-sex partners reported worse health than those with only different-sex partners, but only if sexual intercourse with same-sex partners occurred in the previous 5 years. Age and sex moderated this relationship: having any same-sex partners was associated with worse health for women but not men and among younger adults only.

CONCLUSIONS

The relationship between sexual minority status and self-rated health varies across sociodemographic groups. Future research should use population-level data to examine other health outcomes and continue to explore how the intersection of sexual minority status and other sociodemographic indicators shapes health.