Bible belt states lead the US in gay pornography searches between 2004 and 2011

The states of the Bible belt, America's conservative corridor, lead the country in searching Google for homosexual online media content between 2004 and 2011. I applied Google Insights for Search to the term gay porn and filtered the results to the "Online Media" category. The specific link to the search I performed can be located through this link. The results are normalized by Google such that the scaled numbers can be compared with each other. The top 10 states that lead the United States searching for gay porn are Mississippi, Florida, West Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and New York. The results also include a map showing the relative scaling for search volume across the US.

Search volume index for gay pornography searches

Since a few of the states in the top 10 are Bible belt states, I wanted to graph the search volume index of gay porn as a function of religiosity for people from those states. I included data from a recent Gallup Poll that surveyed Americans about how important religion was to their lives. I plotted the results of this poll as a function of the number of searches for the word 'Bible' in each of the 51 states, just to confirm the that Google searches do indeed reflect the opinions and interests of the people within their states.
To no surprise, as the graph below shows, there is terrific correlation between the Gallup Poll on religion and the relative number of Google searches for the word "Bible".

Utah comes out as an anomaly because of the large Mormon population who are not as interested in searching for the word "Bible". For Utah "LDL" was more searched religious term.

Next, I plotted the Gallup Poll as a function of Google search volume index for "gay porn" and plotted the results below. The trend is not perfect, and it is not meant to be. But it does have some interesting features. The results clearly show that the most religious state, Mississippi, also leads the country in gay porn searches. Several other religious states are also surprisingly at the top of the list.

Those were the results and in my opinion, this data shows that hypocrisy is quite prevalent in the Bible belt. People may be conservative or they may be pretending to be conservative, but there is certainly a lot more homosexuality around than they are led to believe.

It is also possible that homosexuals in these states are oppressed and are reluctant to come out of the closet and fuel their frustrations through openly dating. They may be a lot more isolated and alone than gays in California, for example, which is a much more liberal state. As a result, they turn to the Internet to sexually satisfy themselves.

The table below shows the raw data. Data for the Google searches for gay porn has been extracted from the Google Insights for Research website which can be accessed through this link. Similarly, the data for the "bible" Google searches can be accessed through this link. The data for the importance of religion for the states comes from a recent Gallup Poll.

State	Google searches for gay porn	Google searches for "bible"	Religion is important (%)
Mississippi	100	93	85
Alabama	78	100	82
South Carolina	79	85	80
Tennessee	77	93	79
Arkansas	88	91	78
Louisiana	90	63	78
Georgia	82	77	76
North Carolina	81	76	76
Oklahoma	79	79	75
Texas	93	77	74
Kentucky	90	72	74
West Virginia	89	67	71
Kansas	75	60	70
Utah	61	24	69
Indiana	75	66	68
Missouri	80	64	68
Virginia	64	62	68
South Dakota	63	60	68
North Dakota	59	48	68
Nebraska	68	51	67
New Mexico	91	47	66
Florida	100	60	65
Ohio	85	57	65
Maryland	59	50	65
Pennsylvania	80	48	65
Michigan	78	58	64
Iowa	63	50	64
Illinois	76	49	64
Minnesota	58	48	64
Arizona	80	45	61
Idaho	58	44	61
Wisconsin	65	43	61
Delaware	65	40	61
District of Columbia	56	40	61
New Jersey	77	34	60
Wyoming	66	49	58
California	75	48	57
Colorado	78	44	57
Hawaii	76	40	57
Montana	68	50	56
New York	83	38	56
Connecticut	66	28	55
Nevada	88	33	54
Oregon	57	46	53
Rhode Island	85	25	53
Washington	67	46	52
Alaska	57	49	51
Maine	78	29	48
Massachusetts	71	25	48
New Hampshire	66	28	46
Vermont	74	24	42