Box Turtle Bulletin

Three notes, to add onto your analysis:

1. I was surprised at the brevity of the report and the lack of detail regarding methodology. Maybe I’ve been spoiled in the hard sciences, but I normally wouldn’t even read such a sparse report unless it was the summary of a larger work.

2. Figure 5 is a bit sleazy. One does not specify the size of populations to 7 significant figures. People who understand statistics won’t buy it, and to everyone else, it’s deceptive.

These populations are a bit fuzzy anyway. I appreciate sincere attention being paid here, because we do need serious meta-analyses, but this one simply doesn’t have the rigor required.

3. “Those of us in the community are well aware that identifying as bisexual rather than gay is often as much a matter of caution as it is a reflection of internal perception.”

In addition, some bisexuals feel serious pressure not to identify as such. When I was growing up, bisexuality was associated with “questioning” or uncertainty, or with being promiscuous, or with attention-seeking. The information and research I had access to at the time rarely mentioned bisexuals at all. So, even though I’m a Kinsey 4 (and probably could have guessed this as early as 11), I flip-floped between identities, settling for straight until I was 18, and then came out as bi. If there was less cultural baggage involved, it’s hard to say where either the gay/bi or straight/bi lines would be drawn.

Of course, without said cultural baggage, these identities wouldn’t matter as much in the first place.

Tony P

Ask someone who studies the mind, they have a better insight into it so seek out your local psychologist or psychiatrist.

They KNOW that the range for exclusively gay is 5 to 10 percent of a population. So take 7.5% of 330,000,000 people in the U.S. and you arrive at 24,750,000 lesbian and gay people in the U.S.

Now, those same psychs will tell you that the incidence of bisexuality runs much higher, in the 30% to 40$ range, again midpoint 35% – that would mean 115,500,000 bisexuals in the U.S.

Combined we number 140,250,000. But through the devices of divide and conquer we’ve been held down too long.

Priya Lynn

http://www.webmd.com/sex/news/20060918/many-straight-men-have-gay-sex

And they serve a purpose in that they can â€“ I hope finally â€“ put an end to Kinseyâ€™s 10% figures.

No, they won’t put an end to Kensey’s figures because there is much evidence to support the 10% figure.

“In 2003, Pathela’s team performed telephone interviews with nearly 4,200 New York City men. They conducted the interviews in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian; a translation service helped with interviews in Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Polish, and Haitian Creole.
In nearly every study of sexual behaviour, the percentage of men who report sex with men is higher than the percentage of men who report being gay.

— Nearly one in 10 men who say they’re straight have sex only with other men, a New York City survey finds.
And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married.
In fact, 10% of all married men in this survey report same-sex behaviour during the past year.”

You ommitted a key part of the CDC study on the percentage of gays. Yes 2.3% said they were homosexual and 1.8% said they were bisexual. But 3.9% said they think of their sexuality as “something else” and 1.8% refused to answer. Its a safe bet that given the stigma associated with being gay and the word “homosexual” that virtually all of the 3.9% who said “something else” (gay, likely rather than “homosexual”) and all of the 1.8% who refused to answer were same gay as well, particularly given that the New York survey showed up to 10% of gay men lie about their orientation. That makes for 9.8% who said their sexuality was something other than heterosexual, again, very close to the Kinsey 10% figure.

http://www.webmd.com/sex/news/20060918/many-straight-men-have-gay-sex

A Canadian study of teenagers showed that 14% have some degree of same sex attraction:

“Online interviews were conducted in October 2005 by Ipsos Reid with 1,171 Canadian teenagers aged 14 to 17. As well, 1,139 mothers of teenagers were interviewed, but these weren’t the mothers of the teens who were surveyed. The results are considered accurate to within 2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

In addition, the study found 86 per cent of girls said they were attracted to boys only, while 87 per cent of boys said they were attracted to girls only.”

http://www.saskatoon.ctv.ca/servlet/an/plocal/CTVNews/20080121/teen_sex_080121/20080121/?hub=TorontoNewHome

So, no there will be no “putting an end to the Kinsey 10% figures”. The best any of these surveys can tell us is a minimum figure for the percentage of gays, the upper end is, and will remain unknown, but certainly 10% is a realistic figure.

Priya Lynn

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/ad/361-370/ad362.htm

I got my second link wrong, it should be:

Reed Boyer

Gs and Ls, but “where are the Bs and Ts?”

enough already

Priya Lynn has correctly assessed the matter.

I don’t much care about the “B” part, but as for the “T”, we know that about 1% of children are born with visible qualities of both sexes. Because the evil practice of “snip and sew and pronounce boy or girl” still governs too many delivery rooms, I imagine the real number of people trapped in the wrong gendered body is much higher than normal sampling methods can show.

I’ve taught since the ’80s. Unless I had some very unusual students, I’d guess the numbers are about 10% or so homosexual.

That’s not scientific, but anytime I have a young man who can follow the lecture, talk to his classmates, take notes, text and ask me pertinent questions all at the same time, it’s not surprising to see him between classes in the quad with his head in the lap of another boy or holding hands. Ditto the lesbians – they’re just a little bit more awake aware and interested than average.

Of course, being transexual and or intersexed has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual orientation. Absolutely nothing.

Richard Rush

enough already,

. . . anytime I have a young man who can follow the lecture, talk to his classmates, take notes, text and ask me pertinent questions all at the same time, itâ€™s not surprising to see him between classes in the quad with his head in the lap of another boy or holding hands.

At the risk of going off on a tangent, I’m wondering exactly what you were suggesting by that. On the face of it, it seems as though you were suggesting that gay students are smarter(?). The answer to the question may tie in to something I’ve been thinking about.

enough already

Not smarter. One look at the comments on any gay blog would disabuse you of that really fast. There are, however, some independently repeatable studies showing that gay men and most straight women share a brain structure which is superior at coping with several speech processing and object tracking demands at once.

Maybe the comparison is better made between how straight men are enormously good at tracking one thing, like parallel parking and the tasks of coordinating a sit down dinner party for eight on the phone while cutting Mrs.Waverly’s hair and not missing a frame of OLTL and pulling Mrs. Johnson’s curls out from under the dryer at just the right time.

That doesn’t make us smarter, but it would be useful for all the stereotypical jobs gay men and mothers of young kids are good at.

I’ve no research to cite, but nearly all simultaneous translators I’ve worked with were gay men or straight women.

Sean Santos

“Ask someone who studies the mind, they have a better insight into it so seek out your local psychologist or psychiatrist.

They KNOW that the range for exclusively gay is 5 to 10 percent of a population. So take 7.5% of 330,000,000 people in the U.S. and you arrive at 24,750,000 lesbian and gay people in the U.S.”

Er, how do they know that? Being a mental health professional of any type doesn’t give you the ability to accurately measure from small, self-selected sample sizes, based on vague recollection rather than detailed records. And not all psychologists/psychiatrists know the sexual orientation of all of their patients. Mine didn’t know about me until last week, because I only talk to him about career and ADHD issues, and it simply had never come up.

@Priya Lynn

I feel a bit underwhelmed by the studies you mentioned. One is a study conducted only of citizens of New York City, the results of which have not been replicated in any other group (or, to the best of my knowledge, in NYC). Discussion of precisely this issue can be found here.

Notably, the authors say: “Whether the â€œtrueâ€ proportion of MSM who identify as straight is 1% or 10%, our large city and other metropolitan areas have sizable (>10%) populations of MSM. There will always be a number of straight-identified MSM who will not benefit from public health messages targeting gay- identified men. Medical providers must learn to inquire about sexual behavior rather than identity to serve their patients well.”

The authors themselves were perfectly willing to grant that their results regarding straight-identified MSM may be atypical of the country as a whole. And they were only willing to grant a >10% MSM population to NYC and “other metropolitan areas” (not specifying which ones), not to the country as a whole. It should be noted that some MSM really are “straight” in a socially relevant sense; they may be having sex with men only due to availability or experimentation, rather than typical preference.

With regards to the “something else” and “did not report” categories for the CDC report, I don’t grant that it’s a “safe bet” that they are all gay. This includes people who were confused or uncertain, or even people who were bored and started recording random answers.

Take this puzzling fact: “Among the much smaller group of those [males] reporting themselves as homosexual, 74 percent said they were attracted only or mostly attracted to males, but 23 percent said they were attracted only to females.” Similar results obtained for women

This may cast doubt on the precise percentages, but if the study has some error in it, that surely isn’t evidence for the 10% number. It’s just evidence that we need other studies in order to arrive at a number.

The same might be said for the Canadian teen survey, which didn’t examine in detail the 13-14% of teens who didn’t assert that they were definitely attracted only to the opposite sex. How many of those had a dearth of sexual experience and didn’t feel confident in answering? Or felt a small twinge of same-sex attraction, but not enough that they are ever likely to actively pursue it? We can’t know from that report.

These aren’t really studies in favor of the 10% number. They are only studies that don’t completely rule it out. It doesn’t change the fact that the great majority of surveys have placed the number significantly lower, nor that the original Kinsey report that generated the number had flawed methodology.

Richard Rush

enough already,

Okay, I thought you may just be referring to multitasking, although I’ve always assumed that people with good multitasking ability must be smarter. Maybe that’s because I am terrible at multitasking, so that’s where my assumption comes from.

And to make it worse, now you’ve given me something else to be distressed about: I’ve always been proudly confident of being 100% gay, and now that is being called into question. But I do hate sports, so that counts for something, doesn’t it?

PS: Your clarification doesn’t fully tie into what “I’ve been thinking about,” so I won’t carry this any further off on a tangent.

enough already

Richard,
I feel it, really I do. There are days (hell, there are decades) when I am dependent upon my husband and our dogs (the cats just laugh at me) to remind me which side of the bed is “out” in the morning.

I truly don’t think we’re smarter as a group. Gay men, that is. We are, however, equipped with the female brain anatomy which, together with male bodies suits us quite well for all those roles which promote survival of the species: Babysitters, hunters, teachers, researchers, policemen, doctors, vets, creative people.

And interior decorators. What would the world do without us?

Sean, I haven’t bothered much lately, but every single survey on our share of the population which I have ever really looked at suffered from major flaws. I don’t, personally, care if we are only one gay man having a simultaneous conversation in his head and multi-tasking it out to millions of computers or 10%, as some studies do show. What matters is that those Christians who hate us be attacked, defeated, destroyed and our full civil and human rights legally established.

Frankly, I don’t know how you could even design a survey for this site – there are quite a few with claims on our community who would rather die than be identified with others among us.

Randy

First let me make two assumptions. First sexual orientation is genetic and second that the younger generation is more open about their sexuality than mine (boomer). What numbers would we get if we surveyed a younger generation and then extrapolated the results to the total population? Would this number be more accurate than trying to estimate how many closeted or people in denial there are and factoring the estimate into the results?

enough already

Randy,
It would probably help. The problem, though – to my simple mind – is that our rights have been abrogated. We are not even recognized as fully human.

It should not be necessary for us to prove our numbers for those Christians who hate us to be forced to accept our full human status and for us to receive full civil rights.

On a personal level, I don’t really understand the people who rely on anecdotal evidence to make statements such as “3%” feels about right. Where do they live – in a home for pregnant heterosexual women? I’ve lived in big cities, metropolises, the country, Europe and the US, taught for decades and it surely seems like I keep running into more than 3 out of a hundred people who are gay-lesbian-transgender. More like one in ten people has that extra kick which separates us from the cis-gendered heterosexuals. Sort of like looking at a faded photo from the back of your gramma’s drawer and then seeing a Technicolor film.

enough already

Drat, clicked the wrong icon. Randy, I agree with you about the genetic basis.

Just as women outlive their baby making factories by decades and thus improve the odds of species survival, so has Mother Nature in her wisdom created us, so more kids survive to reproduce.

It’s really that simple. Mutations are either fatal, neutral or beneficent. Mother nature, red of tooth and claw owns the house, runs the bank, stacks the cards and is over there dealing cards and right next to you, shilling.

We would not exist if we were not advantageous to the species or neutral relative to babies surviving to reproduce.

Sean Santos

“Sean, I havenâ€™t bothered much lately, but every single survey on our share of the population which I have ever really looked at suffered from major flaws. I donâ€™t, personally, care if we are only one gay man having a simultaneous conversation in his head and multi-tasking it out to millions of computers or 10%, as some studies do show. What matters is that those Christians who hate us be attacked, defeated, destroyed and our full civil and human rights legally established.”

I agree with the sentiment (although I’d like to point out that it’s not only Christians who are set against us, and that “attacked, defeated, destroyed” is rather more violent imagery that I’d use). It really shouldn’t matter how many of us there are. In fact, even if conservatives were right, and there were “only” as many of us as there are Jews, I think our case would be just as strong, and it would be even more ridiculous that they felt the need to treat us as separate or evil.

That said, I’m a skeptic by nature, and I simply can’t consider your personal experience or incredulity as evidence for how many gay people are out there. Human beings, all human beings, are very very prone to all types of error when estimating this sort of thing.

Secondly:

“We would not exist if we were not advantageous to the species or neutral relative to babies surviving to reproduce.”

I’m not confident about this. Genes can have many effects, and do different things in different people (since genes interact with each other and the environment). Even if homosexuality ultimately reduced the number of children from a family, a gene that promoted it in some people might have some different effect in others. Or multiple effects, such as making someone 25% more likely to be gay, but also giving them a better understanding of the opposite sex, or a different balance of hormones overall. Plus, it seems likely that pre-natal environment plays a role, and not just genes.

Frankly, though, I don’t think the biology matters that much from a moral or social perspective. I’ve never come across a compelling reason that violating gender roles is bad for society (lots of stupid ones, but no compelling ones), and it also seems quite clear to me that the world would be a far poorer, narrower, and less interesting place without us.

Mark F.

“We would not exist if we were not advantageous to the species or neutral relative to babies surviving to reproduce.”

There are lots of genetic conditions that certainly not advantageous to survival (hemophilia, juvenile onset diabetes, etc.). However, the incidence of homosexuality is rather high compared to these conditions, suggesting homosexuality may be somehow advantageous to survival (the doting gay uncle theory, not really well supported by evidence). My take is that environmental factors are more important than many people think. Identical twin studies suggest some genetic influence, but problems with the sample pools in many studies may mean it is wildly overstated. Certainly the sheer number of gay/straight identical twin pairs disproves the theory that homosexuality is 100% genetic.

enough already

Mark, if, through our scientific efforts, we can mitigate those diseases such that the afflicted can reproduce and successfully rear their young, then they are no longer fatal but neutral. If Mother Nature is red of tooth and claw, so is she far more consistent in her objective standards than we are. If it doesn’t help or hurt your species survival then it doesn’t matter.

I am skeptical of the identical twins with differing sexual orientation dichotomy. It appears quite seldom, especially in cultures which consider homosexuals fully human.

There is also the factor to be considered that genotype is not necessarily phenotype. It may well be that one of the twins was genetically coded for the proper homosexual orientation but a mistake in his or her expression arose. I can try to dig out a well written paper on this if you like, it may take a bit of time.

I don’t think every grandmother need be perfect nor every gay uncle doting – though we paid for college for those two of our nieces who wanted to study…it would have been human and vet. med., of course, but that’s life. It is enough that, overall, our existence improves the odds for the young of the species to survive to reproduce and have their young survive, etc.

Of course, this only applies to male homosexuality. One recent study suggests we go hand in hand with a genetic modification which permits women to survive pregnancy at a higher rate and to have slightly more live births than the norm. That surely would lead to the doting uncle!

I imagine their are other factors involved in female sexuality. That female homosexuality exists is a matter of anatomical fact.

It is not surprising that sexual orientation has no co-relation to cis- or transgender status anatomy, given the genetic basis.

Personally, I can acknowledge the possibility that, just as cats can only learn some behaviors within a certain time period, indexed to age, there are certain possibilities which our gay genetic makeup provide us that may or may not be triggered within a certain window during gestation. This is, however, speculation.

Eastside Jim

Bravo Priya Lynn, I agree, and you beat me to posting about those studies. The key take away about Kinsey and those studies, are you have to measure sexual ACTIONS not a state of mind which is subject to change depending upon many factors… including cultural oppression, level of percieved threat or danger to self, and feelings of shame. Even geography makes a difference. If I were asked before I left the area in southern Ohio where I grew up, you would get a different answer than you would get now! Of all the studies that measure sexual activity that I’ve seen (and I don’t claim to have seen them all), the 10% figure for male to male sexual activity is relatively consistent.

I personally know “straight” men who have been intimate with other men, but would be outraged to be considered gay, because they are the “pitcher” and never “catch”. This attitude is very common in Mediterranean and black men.

I don’t recall who expressed the opinion in this thread, but I agree that when twenty years of COMPLETE acceptance have passed, then you may BEGIN to accpet self identification.

Lastly, if you want to measure the percentage of HIV in the “gay” community, you should want to start your measure with all men who have sex with men, regardless of self identification… and then measure the number of those men who are HIV+. If a “gay” man doesn’t have sex with men, why would you want to include him in the study? His chance of being HIV+ are vanishingly small…

Richard Rush

enough already,

We [gays] are, however, equipped with the female brain anatomy which, together with male bodies suits us quite well for all those roles which promote survival of the species: Babysitters, hunters, teachers, researchers, policemen, doctors, vets, creative people.

And interior decorators. What would the world do without us?

Bingo! . . . now I have to go off on that tangent. What I’m about to say is just my speculation, which is influenced by the fact that I was a teenager in the late 1950s – early 1960s. And, by the way, I’m in a field that people would consider artistic/creative (although my specific work involves a lot on the technical side).

Looking more at the past: While gays have always appeared to be disproportionately represented in artistic/creative fields, I suspect it’s an illusion, and that those traits were not so much a part of being gay as they were a part of other characteristics that gave them the strength to allow themselves to be identified as gay. Or if not identified as gay by others, at least to not go down the path of a faux heterosexual life.

Creative people, in general, are typically non-conformists, and creativity demands seeing the world in alternative ways (how many creative Christian fundamentalists do you know?). I think many (most?) creative young people are already non-conformists, outsiders, and unpopular. And, certainly, many non-creatives are also outsiders, and unpopular. But still looking more at the past: When those people were also gay, I think it was easier for them to accept it and thumb their noses at all the conformists.

Still looking more at the past: On the other hand, when a member of the young in-crowd discovered they were gay, it was much more difficult. They were much more likely to go down the faux heterosexual life path. And, today, one of the major surprises of my life is knowing and hearing about all the people who are escaping from that life in the forties, or beyond.

There is a fundamental difference between gays of the past who had the courage to live a gay life (typically not openly, though), and vast numbers of today’s gay young people. Nowadays, we see gay young people of all types coming out, including conservatives, in-crowd types, and conformists. Just think of the GoProud crowd, who would have surely followed the faux heterosexual life had they come of age forty or fifty years ago. I suspect there are few, if any, creative types in GoProud.

So, I suspect that over time gay men will be no more likely to be artistic/creative that straight men. Among straights, unless there is a study to show otherwise, I don’t perceive men to be any less artistic/creative than women – so even if gay men have some female traits, I don’t see why they would be more likely to be artistic/creative.

I don’t think young gays today can imagine the absolute total isolation felt in 1957 at discovering attractions to ONLY the same sex while 100% of the examples in life and media were opposite sex attractions. As far as I knew, I was the only person on earth who felt this way, and I instinctively knew that it had to be my deep dark secret. In those days homosexuality was unspeakable. There was no speaking out against it – wasn’t necessary because it was universally viewed as depravity.

As a somewhat unrelated point, I suspect there is a higher percentage of gays my age who are atheists (like me) than in the general population. When you grow up with the undeniable reality that such a fundamental part of you is at odds with everything the world is demonstrating, you begin to wonder how many other things are really different than what everyone seems to believe.

Sean Santos

@Richard Rush

“While gays have always appeared to be disproportionately represented in artistic/creative fields, I suspect itâ€™s an illusion, and that those traits were not so much a part of being gay as they were a part of other characteristics that gave them the strength to allow themselves to be identified as gay. Or if not identified as gay by others, at least to not go down the path of a faux heterosexual life.”

I’ve always wondered about this. There’s a stereotype about gay men being creative, white, college-educated, upper middle class sorts of people (I guess that this is the “positive” stereotype that emerged against all the negative ones). Of course, such people do exist, and there are all sorts of theories about that (creative roles appeal to gay men because they are more feminine, or maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because gay men go into fields where they think they will be accepted, or gay men have more spending power because they are less likely to be supporting families). But there’s also a very obvious reason, which is that it’s a heck of a lot easier to come out if you are in a socially and financially secure position, and if you have the power to surround yourself with open-minded people.

A lot of homeless youth nowadays are gay or transgendered kids, especially those who are racial minorities. But those kids are relatively invisible because they are socially outcast, and because, let’s face it, how does a black queer homeless kid have a voice in anything?

Donny D.

April 10th, 2011

Timothy Kincaid posted:

I donâ€™t disagree with Gatesâ€™ conclusions, necessarily. They are in the ballpark of reasonable, however shoddily he got there. And they serve a purpose in that they can â€“ I hope finally â€“ put an end to Kinseyâ€™s 10% figures.

Timothy, two things:

1) This is an apples and oranges comparison. Kinsey et al.’s numbers weren’t of who identified as what, but represented people’s sexual thoughts and feelings. A straight-identified closet case who never acted on his lifelong homosexual feelings wouldn’t have shown up as anything but exclusively heterosexaul in Gary Gates’ study, but he could have been represented as homosexual to some degree in Kinsey et al.’s study.

2) You hope Gary Gates’ figures can finally “put an end to” Kinsey et al.’s numbers? Why? Do you truly want us to be perceived as less numerous than we might actually be?

In the current democratic age it doesn’t help to be seen as less numerous. It’s telling that the anti-gays, when speaking of our numbers, always try to diminish them. They never tire of proclaiming, “They’re only two percent of the population!” Yeah, only two percent of us are openly gay, but we’re just the tip of the LGB iceberg.

And intuitively, it makes sense that we aren’t only 2% or 3.5% of the population: straight people wouldn’t be so wound up about us if that were true. I am intuitively sure that straight male closet cases easily outnumber self-identified gay men.

By the way, good post on a very important subject.

Paul Mc

Good post and food for thought for those of us with a smidgin of statistical background. Although UK is different culturally, a very large scale survey found similar results.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/just-15-per-cent-of-britons-are-gay-says-pioneering-survey-2088191.html

The most peculiar thing is the 94% stating that Straight as sexual identity.

The other options were gay/lesbian, bisexual or other – concluding that 1.5% are gay/lesbian/bi seems unusual. I suspect there is a sampling bias – there was an over-representation of professional/managerial and of course big differences in age in relation to readiness to identify as LBG.

My own class in secondary school, 3 people that I know of that are gay out of 60. In another, 2 out of 15 boys were gay. If only 1% was the true figure then this would be highly unlikely set of results.

This isn’t then of the debate – but 10% of people self-identifying as gay seems not to be the case.

enough already

And yet – the Kinsey studies aren’t invalid simply because they were done many decades ago.

It strikes me that every single study reaches the conclusions which the questions put to the correspondents predicate.

Ask me whether I play any instruments and I will honestly answer: Yes.
Ask me, however, whether I am any good at the instruments I play and I will answer: Konzertmeister im Orchester mienes Gymnasiums do it for you? As for the piano, well, dogs don’t exactly howl and cats run away…

And that is only the tip of the iceberg.

I was visiting a cousin in Montana about 12 years back or so. Woman came out to the ranch and asked questions for the census. Told her twice, I was just visiting, she still listed me as resident. When I pointed out that that was not right, she pointed out that I was worth my weight in federal monies, so unless I was sitting on my luggage with ticket in hand, she regarded me as resident.

Same thing applies to the people asked, the circumstances under which they are asked and by whom they are asked.

We are comparing apples and oranges here. They’re both fruit (oh, gods, I can just see the PC police reaching for their truncheons) but until we actually have commensurable data, we don’t really know anything. I’m sticking with my gut feeling, based on Europe, the US and travels in the Mid-East of 10% of the world are somewhere in the non-cis-gendered-gen-u-whine-heterosexual range.

Jim Burroway

And yet â€“ the Kinsey studies arenâ€™t invalid simply because they were done many decades ago.

Actually, that’s not the reason they are invalid. They are invalid because Kinsey did not use a random sample. Nearly half of the “gay” population was sampled in prisons, juvenile facilities and other institutions. Even on conclusions omitting the detention samples, the data was skewed with regard to gender, race, and education. Gebhard & Johnson, Kinsey’s successors who published his data in a more statistical form, note that because of the non-random nature of Kinsey’s data, that it does not represent a random, statistical sample. But for most of the 20th century, it was the largest, of not the best, dataset we had.

enough already

I grant you that the sampled populations were not truly random.

It is, however, enormously difficult, if not impossible to achieve randomness in all aspects of a population group.

His results are not invalid, they are subject to question relative to the bias of the groups sampled.

Which, sadly, can be said to greater or lesser degree about all the other studies on the matter I’ve read.

I’m not saying this to disagree, I’m pointing out that we aren’t doing very much better sixty years on.

In fact, now that we know there are anatomical differences between gay men’s brains and brains of non-gay men, we have to ask whether it is even going to be possible to design studies which don’t weight the inherent capacities which might lead to an over-representation of gay men in certain group (professions or studies requiring better hemispherical coordination) or under-representation in groups which select against female brain structures.

Timothy Kincaid

Donny,

Kinsey et al.â€™s numbers werenâ€™t of who identified as what, but represented peopleâ€™s sexual thoughts and feelings. A straight-identified closet case who never acted on his lifelong homosexual feelings wouldnâ€™t have shown up as anything but exclusively heterosexaul in Gary Gatesâ€™ study, but he could have been represented as homosexual to some degree in Kinsey et al.â€™s study.

Yes, exactly.

But that is not how his numbers are thrown about. Kinsey’s ten percent is tossed out like it answers the question “how many gay people are there?” It does not.

And as the pertinent question in regards to politics, social advancement, civil equality, and religious inclusion is about gay people, not prison inmates, that is what I try to answer.

I don’t speak for the closet or for the downlow. To the extent that our writings here speak for anyone, it is for those who – to a greater or lesser extent – see themselves as being gay.

Why? Do you truly want us to be perceived as less numerous than we might actually be?

No. But there are no studies – of which I am aware – that suggest that 10% of Americans are gay. Or certainly not in the sense that we can say that they are suffering from discrimination or support equality.

And by now there are plenty-o-folk who know it. So when we come in and say “Mr. Congressman, 10% of your voters are gay and they want…” we are flat out lying. And he probably is aware of that.

And I’m not sure what anyone thinks might be achieved by saying 10% of Americans are GAY but 70% of them are ashamed of it and perfectly capable of living according to heterosexual conventions.

Priya Lynn

Timothy said “But there are no studies â€“ of which I am aware â€“ that suggest that 10% of Americans are gay.”.

I posted two such studies. Your pretending they don’t exist won’t make them go away.

Priya Lynn

Timothy said “And Iâ€™m not sure what anyone thinks might be achieved by saying 10% of Americans are GAY but 70% of them are ashamed of it and perfectly capable of living according to heterosexual conventions.”.

Your finding the idea distasteful doesn’t mean its not true although I would point out that just because many, perhaps most gays aren’t forthcoming about it doesn’t in anyway mean they must be living according to heterosexual conventions.

Priya Lynn

And not being forthcoming about one’s orientation doesn’t necessarily mean one is ashamed of it either.

Timothy Kincaid