This chart shows the gayest branches of the military & you’ll never guess which one takes the top spot

The jokes are true: the Navy is crawling with gay men!

Would the Village People ever lie?

How about we take this to the next level?

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A queer statistician posted a chart this week on X that shows the estimated share of gay and bi men in the U.S. Armed Forces. Broken down by service branch, the estimates are based off a 2015 Department of Defense survey.

All five branches are believed to have a sizable percentage of gay and bi male members, with the baseline standing at 4.5% of Marines. The estimated total in the Navy is more than double, with 10.4% of seamen thought to be gay or bi.

For comparison’s sake, 6% of men overall in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ+, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. The average percentage of gay and bi men in each of the five military branches stands at 6.18%.

The specter of men mating with one another in the military is a long-held part of gay lore. Though women now serve in combat roles, the military is still 82.3% male. All-male spaces traditionally foster same-sex bonds, a concept known as homosociality.

Navy men, with their trips to sea and close living quarters, are thought to be especially susceptible. It’s a queer powder keg!

And we haven’t even talked about the uniforms. Those stripes, flares and hats scream gay, gay, gay!

In the navy, come on and join your fellow man!

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Indeed, port cities such as San Francisco and San Diego attracted large swaths of gay sailors in the 20th century, as they settled along California’s coast after tours through the Pacific. If the Gold Rush set San Francisco on a gay path–90% of new emigrants to California during that time were men–then the prevalence of sailors clinched it.

There are a multitude of historical records that give light to the stories of gay and bi service members through the mid-20th century. The 1994 book and film Coming Out Under Fire features numerous interviews with WWII veterans who recall finding each other in coastal cultural meccas such as SF or New York.

Around that time, queer seamen in the U.K. adopted a secret language called Polari to conceal conversations between one another.

During the Lavender Scare, when LGBTQ+ military personnel were targeted en masse, there remained an underground queer culture in the Armed Forces. Surreptitious communities survived through the 2011 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” when queer service members were finally able to serve openly.

In recent years, we’ve seen the military, and Navy in particular, embrace LGBTQ+ inclusion in cheeky and fun ways (seriously)! A former Navy service member, Harpy Daniels, even went viral for their work as a drag queen.

Last summer, a Navy sailor garnered millions of views on TikTok for walking his ship’s deck like a fashion catwalk… momma!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Harpy Daniels (@harpy_daniels)

Of course, Pete Hegseth is trying to curtail the Navy’s more open culture with a series of retrograde and regressive rulings. Perhaps most shamefully, he stripped Harvey Milk’s name from a vessel during Pride Month.

A previous supporter of DADT, Hegseth, who loves working out with sweaty Marines, also nixed the promotion of the rear admiral who allowed Daniels’ aforementioned drag performance.

Still, the numbers don’t lie: the Armed Forces is brimming with gays. They’ve outlasted the Lavender Scare and DADT, and will outlast Hegseth, too.

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