No, Being Gay Doesn’t Take Years Off Your Life

published on August 5, 2018 by Steve Williams, in care2

A Missouri House of Representatives candidate is claiming that being gay takes 20-30 years off your life, and he might just win.

The candidate, 65-year-old Hardy Billington, is running to represent Poplar Bluff, a city in Butler County. This area voted heavily for Trump, and because Billington is the only Republican candidate, he looks likely to do well.

Among many of his questionable positions, Billington reportedly ran a number of ads in a local newspaper calling for a “Don’t Say Gay” ban in schools.

Advocating ”tough love” to help people leave the “gay lifestyle” Billington reportedly claims, “‘Study after study reveals that homosexuality, whether male or female, can take anywhere from 10, 20 to 30 years off of someone’s lifespan. With all the attention on smoking, which the National Cancer Institute says takes from seven to 10 years off someone’s life, why not the same human outcry on homosexuality?“

He adds, “Here’s a behavior that’s killing people two to three times the rate of smoking, yet nobody seems to care.”

Looking at the Facts About Gay and Lesbian Lifespans

Billington’s opinions are obviously discriminatory and wrong-headed, but what about Billington’s specific claims that “study after study” shows homosexuality shortens a person’s lifespan by up to 30 years? In this age of quickly-distributed Fake News it’s important to interrogate every claim that something is true and see where the evidence lays.

Interestingly, Billington’s claim does have a semblance of truth to it, in that there are studies which show homosexuality did overlap with a reduced lifespan, but his claim that this is the direct result of homosexuality isn’t just spurious, it’s flat-out wrong.

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Julio Montaner

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

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No, Being Gay Doesn’t Take Years Off Your Life

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