Let’s not forget that there’s another problem with survey evidence: people who are willing to respond to a survey about their sexual proclivities are the kind of people who don’t mind telling strangers about their sexual proclivities. It strikes me that this might tend to lead to a bad sample and give you an overly high percentage of just about anything.
I think the main problem lies within the lack of definition of ‘gay’. Is a male who prefers males but does have a sense of attraction to females gay? What about a woman who’s been with other women a few times? Sexuality is very rarely (IMO) a concrete, definitive thing.
2trew, a good point, but it’s obviated by the fact that sociological and psychological surveys of this sort depend on “double-blind” testing, where the participants are not known to those designing the survey and the answers for each individual participant are not tie-able to him or her specifically. In such a survey, it’s presumed, people can be substantially more honest about thoughts and feelings that they might have that are not politically or socially acceptable or otherwise embarrassing for them. E.g., if I were to ask you on this board if you’d ever desired sex with your grandmother, and the embarrassing truth is that you had a kinky fantasy about her when you were 14, you’d be inclined to lie rather than admit the fact in a post with your name attached to it. But if you knew that you were taking a survey with that question in it so designed that there was no way the fact that somebody marked “yes” to that question could be tied back to you, you would probably state the truth.
Get a well-designed survey with an accurate “statistical universe” – i.e., not one tied to college kids, jail inmates, members of a given church, people asked at random on the street, but a sample that accurately reflects the group whose views you wish to examine, and you should end up with an accurate reflection of actual thoughts and feelings.
It’s the accurate statistical universe part I think might be the problem. I am, of course, not even close to being qualified to discuss sociological survey techniques or statistical analysis, but I suspect that there is a percentage of the population who will lie even on an anonymous survey, to preserve their own self image if nothing else. Call them the left side of the bell curve, with the right side being represented by the person on the bus who proceeds to tell you about their experience of inverted suspension fire play based on the fact that you asked them what time it was.
I’m not saying it’s going to be an order of magnitude thing, but I do think it would skew the results to a degree that’s probably going to be significant.
Then again, I’m often wrong.
The usual criticism of Kinsey is that the sampling was totally non-random and no corrections were made for the non-random sample. This was by necessity … in 1947 you couldn’t exactly expect to hand out sex surveys on streetcorners. Consequently, Kinsey ended up with what statisticians call a sample of convenience.
Here’s the Kinsey Institute’s take on various studies over the years.
[ul]Brillant idea, ol’ chap. I’ll go first. My estimate is 1/2%.
[sup]Perhaps we should give athelas another chance.[/sup]
[sub]Actually I wasn’t speaking of individuals (rather groups, organizations, etc.) and should have stated as much.[/sub][/ul]
Not for me. I’m skeptical of Kinsey’s findings simply because the 10% figure runs counter to my personal experience. It really has nothing to do with my politics, or any interest in discriminating against gays.
I’ve always thought the 10% figure an over estimate. Like others have said, this is purely based on nothing else than personal experience.
But there is also the problem of definition. Sexuality is not a bi-polar state, there are hundreds of shades of grey.
And the whole number counting thing seems to me to be an appeal to numbers. The size of the percentage makes no difference to the validity of the sexuality, so overstating it doesn’t strengthen your position, it weakens it.
In Brazil, which has a much more tolerant attitude to homosexuals, as much as 30% of the population are predominantly homosexual.
Ah, but how are you identifying them? Unless you are yourself gay (which fact I missed if you’ve so stated; my apologies) and have kept track of number of outraged rejections per acceptance in asking other people of your own sex to engage in sex practices, you’re identifying “gay people” with “those who are openly gay” and therefore obviously gay to you as an acquaintance – and that number was extremely small in the 1950s, and is probably nothing like 100% of those who recognize themselves as gay or have gay feelings today.
Do you know the details of the home life of every one of your fellow employees, every member of your church (if you attend one), every person who belongs to clubs you belong to, all the clerks at all the stores you deal at, your doctor, your dentist, their assistants, the guy who watches over where you park your car, the cops that patrol your area…
Dollars to donuts somewhere in that list I’ve named a few gay people that you don’t know are gay, people who live normal lives and go home to their partners or out on dates, but with someone of the same sex.
Here here, Polycarp! I think a lot of heterosexual folks would be surprised at how many homosexuals and bisexuals out there are flying under the radar, or gaydar. The ones so often accused of “flaunting” their sexual orientation, those who openly discuss being gay/bi with just anyone or who have identifying t-shirts, badges, tattoos, jewelry, or bumperstickers, are by far in the minority. I never went in for that sort of thing myself, but I have to appreciate those who do. They’re the ones reminding straight society at large that we actually exist.
Just yesterday I went in for a minor outpatient procedure and noticed that one of the assisting nurses was wearing a small, discreet set of freedom rings. This made her the only health care professional I have ever encountered (and since I’m chronically ill I’ve encountered hundreds) who I could be fairly certain was not heterosexual. Although many have mentioned their wives, husbands, or other opposite-sex romantic partners to me, none have ever said anything about having a same-sex partner. Given this experience, it might be tempting to estimate that far less than 1% of people in medicine are homosexual or bisexual because I’ve only met one…that I know of. So I can see how people might think there aren’t many homosexuals or bisexuals in the world unless they also have my experience of actually knowing enough homosexuals and bisexuals to realize that many would never mention their orientation or allude to it in any way at work, or when around anyone who they weren’t certain would be tolerant.
It’s possible for homosexuals and bisexuals to “pass” in straight society. Sometimes this requires far less effort than being “out”, since you usually have to tell people that you aren’t straight while if you keep quiet they assume that you are. So for anyone who thinks there can’t be a very high percentage of non-heterosexuals in the world based only on their personal experience, remember that there are homosexuals and bisexuals around you every day who you don’t know about – and I can all but guarantee that there’s at least one person in your life who you think you know fairly well but who has thus far refrained from mentioning their orientation to you.
I think I may have just found a way to get pitted, or at least draw a lot of fire.
I’m wondering how valid the question is.
The spectrum just seems too broad. I’ve known women who’ve come out as lesbians but never actually gotten around to the whole “being attracted to women” part of it, “straight” women who’ve always had a crush (and, at least to hear them tell it been quite willing to act on that) on a particular actress, guys who’ve had sex with about as many men as women but always managed to find a reason why that doesn’t count because they’re “straight”, people who self identify as bisexual because of that one night in college but seem to reserve their entire attention for one sex, etc.
It seems kind of clumsy to me to just cut the bell curve in thirds and assign names to them, especially considering the possibility that it’s not a bell curve.
As a practical matter I’ve just taken to accepting people as whatever they say they are, but from an objective standpoint the whole thing leaves a lot to be desired.
Somebody who’s actually read the literature or given this more than a passing thought can earn my gratitude by pointing out where I’ve been an idiot.
We jerked this question around at great length in Great Debates a while ago, with the concerns you’ve brought into the ambit of the basic question, but let’s see if I can come up with something resembling an accurate summary (avoiding “a straight answer” ;)) to what you raise:
There are three aspects to classifying sexuality: activity, orientation, and identification. Each is capable of causing some confusion, but does lead to an essential and valid point.
First, take activity. Nothing could be more obvious than “if you have sex with another man/woman (based on which you are, the “another” being the functional point here), you’re gay.” Yet, as noted somewhere on the boards recently, it was not considered to be “queer” about 50 years ago to be the active partner – the person fellated or the top in anal sex. And what German scholars of the period called Not-homosexualiet – the turning to persons of the same sex for relations when persons of the opposite sex were not available, as in boarding schools, on ships, or in prisons, was fairly common. Such persons did not consider themselves to be homosexuals – they were simply gratifying their sex drive with what was available for sexual release. Here one bases one’s determination on what category of person is chosen for sex when all categories are available (obviously it’s more complex than that – “what sort of person is pursued romantically” would help that statement a bit, but I trust you see my point).
Then orientation. A gay person is one who is sexually attracted to persons of the same sex; a bisexual person, one who is attracted to persons of both sexes. But a problem arises: nobody is attracted to all persons of the target sex. I would venture to guess that none of our gay members finds Rush Limbaugh or Jesse Helms at all attractive; few if any straight men could conceive of sex with Mother Teresa. And most gay men will find one or two women sexually attractive; many men who identify as “100% straight” have had at least a passing impulse towards another man or boy, perhaps an intimate friend, at some point in their life. The key would seem to be what the predominant target of sexual desire is, if any.
Finally, identification is important, and this only came out in our discussions after about two years of debate on behavior vs. orientation vs. cause vs. sinfulness vs. whatever else somebody threw into the mix. And this is, principally, what do I conceive of myself as? Coming out and stating “I am gay” is an acknowledgement of orientation, to be sure, but it’s one thing further – it’s an identification of self with a group of persons, an assuming of a category. There are more than a few people who are attracted to the same sex but repulsed by “the gay subculture” and who evolve rather complex individual-specific terminologies to distinguish between themselves, with homosexual desires, and “the gay people” who are a part of “the gay subculture” with its bar scenes, activism, etc. Contrariwise, I’ve mentioned counseling a young man who enjoyed exchanging oral sex with other men when drunk but whose predominant sober orientation was to women, and who classed himself as “straight.” This would tend to help explain the idea of “women who choose to be Lesbian” – bisexual by orientation, they have had sufficient negative experiences with men that they choose to focus exclusively on Lesbian relationships. Successful “ex-gays” are also probably bisexual by orientation but, believing gay sex to be sinful, have chosen to suppress any homosexual attraction and focus on their heterosexual desires. (Most of them IMHO should be called Cleopatra, as being queens in denial, if you’ll forgive the slightly-pejorative pun. ;))
When I first met “my son” – the runaway boy for whom I became guardian – it was love at first sight, and grew into one of the most meaningful relationships I’ve ever had. Both of us identify as “straight” and consider the faintly erotic subtext to our love to be anomalous (and not worth risking two good marriages to look into) but fully admit and revel in the love we share. Not all relationships fit into even the most finely crafted pigeonholes.
Does that analysis help at all in dealing with the question?
Polycarp, your post (I feel like somebody who went out to buy a switchblade and came home with a neutron bomb) has given me a toolkit for analysis, and set into words what I’ve been thinking about.
What it doesn’t do, though, is help with my question re: the OP. If you’re trying to find the percentage of people who are gay, where do you count an actively bisexual straight identified gay oriented person, or anybody who falls into more than one of the categories?
I mean, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad is a good Meatloaf lyric, but it’s not really a scientifically valid method.
Self delusion, societal expectation, there are a lot of things that can contaminate the validity of the individual response that makes up part of the statistical sample.
I’ve resigned myself to poetry, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of”. Substitute any appropriate body part for heart. My own political bent is such that I’m loathe to question anyone who claims to be “GAY, GAY, GAY I TELL YOU!” (while I’d really wonder about anyone who was that insistent about being straight, go figure), but I really don’t see where the additional analysis helps with the fact that I see the three categories of “Gay”, “Straight”, and “Bisexual” as artificial.
The analysis you’ve provided, as much as I admire and will adopt it, requires those terms (the bisexual man who believes that gay sex is sinful and only focuses on his heterosexual desires, etc.) as a frame of reference, but none of them can be sufficiently defined as to get any kind of precision.
I just think (and I suspect we’re in agreement here) that the question itself is not answerable because people are too complicated and sex is one of the really complicated areas of people.
How many men like a penis in their ass, and risk HIV infection?
I don’t know.
That was so uncalled for, and no contribution at all. You risk HIV infection when you have unprotected sex with anyone, not just gay men. Many gay men do not have anal sex.
No flames from me, because I am inclined to agree with you. There’s a broad spectrum of human sexual desire and behavior, and while much of this seems to be due to inborn (or at least not-consciously-chosen) factors, it does not seem that God or Nature has arranged people into distinct and tidy groups based on this. In fact, the only distinct and tidy groups I know of for humans are the ones created by society. It’s possible to invent a firm definition for a group like “Anyone who has ever had sex with a person of the same sex is homosexual”, but does inventing such a group really tell us anything? Do people who’ve engaged in same-sex sexual activity have anything in common with one another besides that fact?
So yes, the question itself is problematic. However, a question like “What percentage of Americans are black?” has similar flaws. What does it mean to be black? Is it a question of skin color alone? Who your ancestors were or where they came from? Your cultural upbringing? What about people of mixed ethnic heritage? Yet these issues don’t stop many people from identifying themselves or others as “black”. It seems that humans like to put each other into convenient boxes, no matter how arbitrary the reasons for sticking people in those boxes might be. And while this is a bit silly it may sometimes be useful, and is probably not harmful as long as we all realize that while Nature or God can be credited with the diversity of humanity it was we ourselves who built the boxes and came up with the rules for seperating one group from another.
>> Assuming that gayness is 100% biological, you’d never end up at 10%. Genetics doesn’t work in base 10.
Maybe beating a lifeless horse here, but there are a couple of issues with this.
First, having an attribute be biological doesn’t necessarily mean it’s even partially genetically determined. For instance, the scar on my knee is biological – it’s not like social pressure could make me change it – but it’s certainly not genetically determined.
Second, many (most) attributes are affected by both genetics and environment (which could easily lead to a 10% incidence). For instance light-skinned people are more susceptible to skin cancer, but not every light-skinned person has melanoma.
And finally, even if a trait is completely and absolutely genetically determined, there’s no reason one allele couldn’t be present in 10% of the population – for instance how many people are blue-eyed in a typical U.S. population? (I don’t know if it’s one in ten, but well could be).
If a trait is determined by one and only one gene, and it doesn’t have a major impact on survival, then you couldn’t have exactly 10% of one set of siblings have the trait, but that’s about the only thing you can say.
FWIW, 10% seems high to me, based on completely unscientific mental survey of those I know well enough to be confident in what sex they’re most attracted to. One in 20 or 30 would be my guess, so I find Puddleglum’s studies plausible.
Puddleglum, I noted your response and meant to ask about it, but then logged off and have forgotten to until now.
I am curious if you know anything further about those studies beyond the numbers posted – how they were conducted, what the footnotes reference, the source for your data, etc.
While I’m not at all interested in impugning your contribution here, the fact of the matter is that, like other studies that seem to show inordinately high figures, yours may have ended up slanted low, for a variety of reasons: e.g., they were “cherry-picked” by a conservative, anti-gay source to reflect only the lowest statistical results; they were the results of a survey population that does not adequately reflect the target universe; they were the results of face-to-face or other non-anonymous surveying techniques, which might mean that persons “in the closet” were reluctant to reveal the truth. None of these objections may be valid for the results you cite; but I’d very much like to know what the methodologies for them were, if you have it or a link to it, and what your source for them was, to eliminate those possibilities. Thanks!
Good point - I don’t know those who are gay except those who claim to be gay. And a couple who don’t claim, but are anyway. Anyway, good point. Under the gaydar indeed.
The only thing, though, is you gave me quite a list, and would bet that a few of them a gay, unbeknownst to me. Sure, but 1 in 10? Alright, given that maybe 1 in 50 is someone who I know is gay, 8 out of a hundred?
Maybe, but I remain skeptical.
At the risk of being flamed for something that has maybe been debunked (if so I haven’t heard), maybe a good way to determine percentage of gays in males would be to get our hands on some data about the size of hypothalmuses.
I guess it’s pretty clear that I believe being gay is primarily biological.
And 1 in 10 does seem to be too convenient (it sure would make the math easier).