Over a plate of remarkably dry chicken piccata at the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer, I found myself in a spirited debate with a prominent evolutionary biologist about the limits of infinite growth. He was concerned with global phosphorus reserves. I, however, had my eye on a much more volatile and precious resource: the sexual fluidity of the American adolescent.
For nearly a decade, the sociological data has charted a staggering, glorious upward trajectory. Year after year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and year after year, the percentage of teenagers identifying as gay, bisexual, or somewhere on the magnificent spectrum of human possibility climbed higher. We were living through a golden age of demographic discovery.
But the latest numbers have arrived, and they have brought a sudden, chilling plateau. The exponential growth has stopped. In some brackets, the numbers have even dipped. The media is in a frenzy, and sociologists are furiously penning think pieces about legislative backlashes and the algorithmic suppression of queer joy.
But they are staring at the bark and missing the forest. The universe is telling us exactly what it has always told us: you cannot sustain a perpetual motion machine, and you cannot sustain a high school where eighty-five percent of the junior class is trapped in a mathematically impossible web of romantic entanglements.
We must introduce the concept of Peak Bisexual.
Just as there is Peak Oil—the theoretical point where the maximum global rate of extraction is reached—there is a natural, thermodynamic limit to the extraction of non-normative identity from the youth population. For the past decade, we have essentially been fracking the American middle school. We drilled deep into the suburban cul-de-sacs. We deployed advanced social media technologies to bring up massive, previously untapped reserves of pansexual sophomores that previous generations of survey methodologists couldn’t even reach.
We extracted this identity at a breakneck pace, marveling at the sheer volume of self-discovery bubbling up to the surface. But the universe, in its infinite wisdom, demands equilibrium.
It is deeply irresponsible to suggest that the declining number of queer youth is a course-correction by the Milky Way, especially since we literally just changed the wording from 'sexual identity' to 'sexual orientation' and confused a bunch of freshmen.
Arthur is a brilliant statistician, but he lacks vision. He is trapped in the terrestrial mechanics of his spreadsheets. When he sees a methodological artifact caused by a slightly altered questionnaire, I see the invisible hand of cosmic selection guiding the species back from the brink of absolute demographic entropy.
Consider the biological energy required to maintain a complex, non-normative identity in the modern era. It requires vast amounts of psychosocial caloric expenditure. You have to explain your pronouns to your grandparents at Thanksgiving. You have to navigate the constantly shifting orthodoxies of TikTok micro-labels. You have to curate an aesthetic that signals your exact coordinates on the Kinsey scale while simultaneously pretending you don't care about aesthetics.
This is a massive thermal load on the developing brain. The universe is fundamentally lazy; it always trends toward the lowest possible energy state. And right now, the lowest possible energy state for a fifteen-year-old is simply shrugging, selecting 'straight' on a digital tablet, and going back to watching YouTube shorts.
The recent fluctuation in adolescent self-reporting is almost certainly an artifact of our decision to move the demographic questions to the end of the survey module, but I suppose if you want to call that the slowing of the cosmic pendulum, I cannot physically stop you.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with the late, great Stephen Hawking, who once told me over tea in Cambridge that the greatest illusion of the human mind is the belief that a trend line will go up forever. He was talking about black hole information paradoxes, but the principle applies perfectly to the sexual orientations of the class of 2028.
If we apply basic carrying capacity models to the suburban education system, the math becomes undeniable. A standard public high school ecosystem can only support a certain density of queer teenagers before the drama club collapses into a singularity. There are only so many leading roles in the spring musical. There is only so much floor space at the local independent coffee shop. Eventually, the environment is stripped of its resources, and the population must correct itself.
The teens are not retreating into the closet, as the alarmists claim. They are simply achieving aerodynamic efficiency. They are shedding excess demographic drag as they re-enter the atmosphere of early adulthood.
The researchers who authored the recent study—those poor, bewildered data entry clerks of the human condition—plead with us to remember that the data is complicated. They point out that teenagers are notoriously fickle survey takers, and that a slight change in how a question is phrased can drastically alter the outcome.
To which I say: if a teenager can be deterred from their fundamental sexual identity by the placement of a radio button on page four of a PDF, then that identity lacked the gravitational density to survive the cold vacuum of space anyway.
We are seeing a statistically significant reversion to the mean, which is to say, teenagers are realizing that being bisexual requires going on dates, and they would rather stay home.
We should be thanking these teenagers. By stabilizing the data, they have saved us from a runaway greenhouse effect of infinite identity categories. They have looked into the swirling, boundless void of human possibility, stared down the terrifying freedom of absolute sexual fluidity, and bravely said: 'No thank you, I am tired.'
That, ultimately, is the most profound discovery of all. We are stardust, after all, and sometimes stardust just wants to blend in with the background radiation.