By Peter Berton

MONTREAL, Canada – The very notion of same-sex marriage and domestic partnerships may turn stomachs in the southern U.S., but gay porn sure doesn’t. According to statistics compiled by one of the world’s most-trafficked tube sites, residents of the Deep South consume more videos of hot male-on-male sex per capita than folks in states where gay marriage is legal.

So that’s what they mean by “the South shall rise again!”

This revelation comes from the Pornhub Insights research team: The U.S. anti-gay-marriage state with the highest percentage of surfers requesting gay porn is — drum roll, please — Mississippi. According to Pornhub’s servers, 5.58 percent of Mississippians seek gay porn videos. That’s 1.5 percent higher than the national average of 4.13 percent.

It should be noted that Mississippi is one of a handful of U.S. states that stubbornly continue to resist the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which declared sodomy laws unconstitutional. (The others are Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. All but Idaho, Michigan and Utah are in the South.)

As might be expected, according to Pornhub, “Louisiana is closely on [Mississippi’s] rear at 5.44 percent” gay-porn penetration, followed by Georgia with 5.38 percent.

When it comes to gay porn consumption in states where same-sex marriage is legal, Hawaii comes in first at 5.38 percent — coincidentally, the same percentage achieved by anti-gay-marriage state Georgia. New York and California — generally considered hotbeds of gay rights activism — are tied at 5.27 percent.

“Like in all things, there must be a top and a bottom,” Pornhub Insights noted in a statement. “In this case, it’s Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Idaho that have the lowest percentage of gay porn users, all below the 3 percent mark.”

[SIZE=1]Image courtesy Pornhub.com[/SIZE]