Abstract
We provide new evidence on sexual orientation, sexual attraction, and income using data from the 2015-2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). These data ask individuals about both orientation and attraction, allowing us to describe a sexual minority group that has been hidden in prior research: people who identify as heterosexual but who concurrently report some same-sex attraction. We show that this population is much larger than the sample of self-identified gay, lesbian, or bisexual people, and we show that relative to heterosexual people who report exclusively different-sex attraction, heterosexual people who report some same-sex attraction are younger, less likely to be married, and much more highly educated. We document that, controlling for observables, heterosexual men who report same-sex attraction experience robust and statistically significant employment and income penalties relative to heterosexual men who are exclusively different-sex attracted. These penalties are larger for non-Hispanic White men than for non-Hispanic Black men. We find no similar penalty for heterosexual women who report same-sex attraction. Our results indicate that prior research has overlooked one of the largest groups of sexual minorities-heterosexual people who report some same-sex attraction-who experience systematically different economic outcomes than heterosexual individuals who are exclusively different-sex attracted.