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Bisexual Youths More Likely to Have Risky Sex
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The findings indicate that AIDS education programs in high schools should be geared to include teens who may be bisexual, according to Massachusetts researchers.
They found young men with bisexual experience were more likely to have four or more sexual partners, use alcohol and/or drugs at their most recent intercourse, and were the least likely to use condoms compared with young men with female-only or male-only partners.
Overall, 33% of teens with partners of both sexes said they used a condom at most recent intercourse, compared with 66% of teens who exclusively had female partners and 61% who only had male partners, the report indicates.
Bisexual teens were also between 8 and 10 times more likely to have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease. All of these factors can increase a person's risk for contracting HIV, according to the report in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health, journal of the American Public Health Association.
Currently, an estimated 112,000 to 250,000 American adolescents are HIV positive with nearly half of this group made up of young men who have male sexual partners, the authors note.
"The behaviors that may lead to HIV infection are usually initiated in adolescence," according to Dr. Carol Goodenow of the Massachusetts Department of Education in Malden and colleagues. "Focusing on adolescents can inform prevention efforts that target young people who are still in school," they write.
In the study, about 67% of youths with bisexual experience remembered having any AIDS education in school, compared with 83% to 93% of other teens.
Of the group surveyed, 3,065 reported having only female sexual partners, 94 had only male sexual partners and 108 had partners of both sexes.
Goodenow's team notes that sexual identity issues among adolescent males may blunt the effectiveness of broad-based sexual education efforts.
For instance, the investigators found that "more than two thirds of males with only same-sex experience and more than one quarter of bisexually experienced males labeled themselves as heterosexual."
Given the stigma associated with having same-sex partners, the researchers note that it is unrealistic to hope that young men get AIDS-related information from gay or bisexual support or social groups.
"It may be possible, however, to make mainstream classroom instruction more inclusive and more culturally appropriate for sexual minority adolescents," Goodenow and colleagues suggest.
"It is critical that such programs be strengthened and that their message be clearly relevant to the needs and choices faced by all sexually active youths," they conclude.
SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health 2002;92:203-210.