I’m a little bit afraid to Google my query, but I’m curious what country has the highest reported percentage of homosexual inhabitants.
I imagine it would be pretty hard to gather truly accurate data, since there are so many places where people would be afraid to admit to their sexual orientation, even in an anonymous survey. And I don’t think orientation is usually asked about on a census (though it may report prevalence of same-sex couples living together, which might be a helpful metric - again though only in countries that tolerate it).
My starting presumption would be that that–willingness to identify as gay–is the only variable between countries. Is there a reason to think otherwise?
I believe that homosexuality is probably at a consistent rate in all countries.
I am in Thailand right now, and it definitely seems as though a willingness to identify as gay is very high in Bangkok, there seems to be ladyboys everywhere I go.
The Philippines is another country where gays seem to be more comfortable to identify as gay. It is easy to spot both male and female gays almost everywhere in the Philippines.
As opposed to China, where I am often told that there are no gays in China… :rolleyes:
Again, what is the factual basis for this assumption? I don’t get it. Is blonde hair found in consistent proportions across all countries? Average heights? Congenital disorders? Even the sex ratio at birth is not quite consistent across all countries. So why would we assume that sexual orientation is?
I’m seeing the usual assumptions that “visibly gender-nonconforming” is synonymous with “gay.” :rolleyes:
Baseless definitions or poor definitions -> Flawed metholologies -> Meaningless data.
Yes, exactly. Whether homosexuality is a product of genes or of upbringing (or some combination of the two), we’d expect to see variance by country/culture. Heck, even if the trait is evenly distributed to start with, you’d expect certain places (say, San Francisco) to have higher concentrations as people move to a place that is more accepting of them.
The only truly surprising answer to the original question would be to find that there are no differences.
The Philippines have an interesting gay culture, gays are not so much accepted as they are tolerated if they adopt a kinda third gender status. Gay men and women who behave in manners similar to their gender stereotypes are oddly more discriminated against compared to other countries norms where ‘straight acting’ is more desired.
The Chinese government certainly doesn’t maintain that position. They have even had state sponsored gay events. The rule in china for gays is pretty much you can do whatever you want but if the government views a collection of homosexuals as a political opposition movement they will send the police out with clubs to ransack the bars and clubs. So keep whatever you do small and in support of the ruling party or it’s over. No protesting for civil rights, you get what they give you and that’s it.
I imagine polling will always find more gays in gay friendly countries. No organization I know of has done a multi-country survey. With all the studies following different standards for determining sexual orientation it’s impossible to find equivalent measures. In the US we get different result all the time based on perimeters.
The highest result on any one study I’ve seen was Norway with over 12 percent of the people polled claimed to have had homosexual intercourse at least once.
I’ve read articles hypothesizing that, if there is a generic component to sexual orientation, places in the middle east where gays stay firmly in the closet, get married, and have children, are going to have a lot more of those genetic components spread around.
Install a secular government in Saudi Arabia and things are going to get really fabulous really fast.
Yeah. They may be related (e.g. the percentage of straight men that are “sissy” may be less than the percentage of gay men that are “sissy”, but it doesn’t show any form of causation.
And for the people who just can’t wait for it, I would guess Urgay, Pairogay, Gayana, and Canada have the highest percentage.