In a recent discussion on another board, the subjest of the amount of gay people there are in the’ UK/US came up. I remember in the 80’s TV advertisments telling us about AIDS and how 1 in 5 people might be gay.
Now this figure seems a littler large to me considering that in reality only about 2% of my friends are gay and not 20% as I had been told 15 years ago.
I realise that it’s always going to be difficult to get a true answer but what’s the general thinking at the moment. Closer to 5% ?
Apparently 1 in every 5 people in the world is gay… and there are 5 people in my family. So it must be me, my dad, my mum, my younger brother Colin or my older brother ‘Dancing Queen’ Dave… But I think it’s Colin.
Sorry, Tommy Cooper moment there.
I think your suggestion of about 5% is nearer the mark, it matches the number of my friends that are gay. Perhaps it depends on where you define “Gay” - is someone only gay if they sleep only with members of the same sex, or are you gay after one same-sex encounter? This would make the percentage increase markedly I think.
Thinking about it, you don’t need to participate in homosexual relationships to be gay… I was hetrosexual before I had sex… oh, for so long… [cough]. Sorry. Anyway, I’m moving more into GD territory here.
One in five? That’s 20% of the population. No way. Kinsey said 1 in 10, and from this board I’m given to understand that’s still much too high. I thought it was more like 2%.
The numbers have come down dramatically in the last 30 years, from 10/20% to 2%. Either the earlier studies were wrong (of course, today’s never are - scientific advances, you know), or, assuming homosexuality to be biologically caused, then either or both our genes are mutating or the embryonic soup has changed its hormonal levels. Something for the evolutionary biologists to sink their teeth into.
Michael Flanders (of Flanders and Swann) summed it up best for me (though about mental illness):
Well,according to a preliminary analysis of the 2001 census,those who actually stated they were in a homosexual relationship was much lower than the figures usually quoted-approximately 80,000 which works out at approximately 1 in every 750 people.
Well that’s only those who stated they were in a homosexual relationship…those who didn’t declare it on their forms or who had someone else filling in the forms and didn’t tell them wouldn’t get recorded…
Yes, please take note of the differences. Being asked something in a relatively anonymous survey - at least for some people - is pretty damn different from writing it down on a government form.
Sexuality doesn’t exist in a binary state. It’s a continuum. And one sexual encounter of one type or another doesn’t set your sexuality in stone forever.
Self-reporting surveys are notoriously prone to inaccuracies, but there’s no certain way for a third-party to determine someone’s sexuality. You can only ask. Frankly I’m not willing to accept any percentage as more accurate than any other, they’re all flawed. All I can say is that personally, in my experience, around 5% is possibly in the right region. But we’re never going to get accurate figures for this.
Perhaps we’re better off that way. I don’t see what a numbers game proves or matters from any viewpoint.
If homosexuality is in large part genetic, then it would be expected that the number of homosexuals if falling, as those with the homosexual gene (especially men) are far less likely to have offspring, and thus the numbers will progressively be reduced.
People who come up with figures like 10 or 20 percent (like Kinsey) are casting their nets as widely as possible. A “same sex encounter” (from the 22%/17% study) could be something as innocuous as having a gay guy or lesbian hit on you. OTOH, studies that define homosexuality extremely narrowly (ie, exclusively homosexual, with pretty much no heterosexual inclinations at all) tend to get something like half a percent. I’d say that the 3% figure is probably pretty close to correct for people who consider themselves “gay.”
Note: in my area, the number of people who are openly gay is far less than 3%, but then this isn’t a very tolerant area. In some place like California, I’d imagine that the number of gays who are still “in the closet” would be very small. Also, certain areas (like California and New York) have a larger-than-normal percentage of homosexuals because these areas have a reputation for being more tolerant.
It’s OT and a nitpick, but - like many of the lines now well-meaningly attributed to Cooper - the original joke’s actually by the British comedian Tim Vine - see this recent interview with him.