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Using data from a US national probability sample of self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults (N = 662), this article reports population parameter estimates for a variety of demographic, psychological, and social variables. Special emphasis is given to information with relevance to public policy and law. Compared with the US adult population, respondents were younger, more highly educated, and less likely to be non-Hispanic White, but differences were observed between gender and sexual orientation groups on all of these variables. Overall, respondents tended to be politically liberal, not highly religious, and supportive of marriage equality for same-sex couples. Women were more likely than men to be in a committed relationship. Virtually all coupled gay men and lesbians had a same-sex partner, whereas the vast majority of coupled bisexuals were in a heterosexual relationship. Compared with bisexuals, gay men and lesbians reported stronger commitment to a sexual-minority identity, greater community identification and involvement, and more extensive disclosure of their sexual orientation to others. Most respondents reported experiencing little or no choice about their sexual orientation. The importance of distinguishing among lesbians, gay men, bisexual women, and bisexual men in behavioral and social research is discussed.

In recent years, epidemiologists have conducted dozens of surveys asking men around the world if they would be willing to be circumcised to reduce their HIV-risk. Men's responses in turn constitute an important factor in predicting the overall success of circumcision campaigns. Whereas researchers often position survey responses as passive reflections of attitudes, my analysis reveals a more complex picture. The reviewed surveys invite men to consider a part of their bodies as posing a risk to themselves, their partners or their communities, and its removal as a means to permanently transition from the 'high' to the 'low' risk category. In the process, they position some bodies as inherently riskier than others, thereby carving out new HIV-risk subject positions based not on identity or behavior, but the body itself. Because claims about what one can do to mitigate the spread of HIV are not easily disentangled from what one ought to do, I suggest that these surveys simultaneously imbue willingness to be circumcised with a sense of ethical obligation. In doing so, I argue that circumcision-willingness surveys constitute a discursive technology integral to male circumcision's emergence as an HIV-risk reduction strategy, not simply a tool that identifies willing subjects passively awaiting the next public health intervention.

In this paper, I examine disputes over recent claims that male circumcision reduces HIV risk to suggest a complicated relationship between risk individualization and categorization. Whereas randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in sub-Saharan Africa appear to have provided key evidence for the World Health Organization's endorsement of male circumcision as an HIV prevention strategy, RCTs alone did not provide evidence for the underlying causal mechanism. For that, medical authorities have turned to histo-immunological studies of the foreskin's biomolecular vulnerability to HIV, thus molecularizing risk. Some actors used these studies both as a way of shoring up results of RCTs conducted in sub-Saharan Africa and as an important rationale in arguments for making neonatal circumcision more widely available. Others, however, resisted this move to generalize the RCT results to other parts of the world, citing both contextual differences in HIV transmission patterns and conflicting scientific details regarding the biomolecular basis of the foreskin's susceptibility. Nevertheless, by locating an abstract notion of relative risk in the body itself, I argue that histological studies of foreskin have played a key role in stabilizing male circumcision status as a new risk category, largely independent of a given individual's risk profile.

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