Okay, now your turn.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

And yet – the Kinsey studies aren’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.

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.

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.

I don’t disagree with Gates’ conclusions, necessarily. They are in the ballpark of reasonable, however shoddily he got there. And they serve a purpose in that they can – I hope finally – put an end to Kinsey’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.