There is little reliable evidence about what percentage of the U.S. population is in reality gay or lesbian, due to few representative surveys asking about sexual orientation, complexities surrounding the groups and definitions involved, and the probability that some gay and lesbian individuals may not choose to identify themselves as such. Demographer Gary Gates last month released a review of population-based surveys on the topic, estimating that 3.5% of adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, with bisexuals making up a slight majority of that figure.
Gee, I wonder how that could be? Maybe it is because there isn't a show on television that doesn't include a gay character along with the token female and token minority. Could it be because seemingly everybody associated with the entertainment industry has also professed to be gay or a lover of all things gay and wish they could be too? Quite possibly it could be because when the gay activist rally the troops, like they did in California over the gay marriage issue on the ballot, their side of the story was granted all the publicity, while the lives they ruined and threatened in their wake were ignored.
Maybe if more attention to given to such events as the Folsom Street decadence (That link is to the tamer pictures. Inside that link is a link to the NSFW pictures. Come to think of it that first link ain't all that safe.)that takes place in San Francisco the number of people claiming to be associated with gays would drop dramatically.
Amazing how a group that makes up so little of the population manages to bully their way into our lives and garners so much attention.
A token female? you do know they make up over 50% of the population don't you? And btw, all those gay people you see on tv? probably not even close to even the lowball 3.5% the article claims is the closer figure. Your perception is just as clouded by your bigotry as are those of the majority of math-challenged Americans. dumbass.
ReplyDeleteGay, straight, bi, confused, transgender yadda, yadda.
ReplyDeleteEnough. Pleeeeeze.
FWIW, a group of medical forensics types has been tracking the percentage of homosexuals in the population by venereal disease rates (male and female have significantly higher ones than heterosexuals), and have come up with the figure of 1.3%.
ReplyDeleteThis has been tracked for about a decade when they first posited a range of .5 to 1.5%, so it's worth considering.
FWIW, a group of medical forensics types has been tracking the percentage of homosexuals in the population by venereal disease rates (male and female have significantly higher ones than heterosexuals), and have come up with the figure of 1.3%.
ReplyDeleteThis has been tracked for about a decade when they first posited a range of .5 to 1.5%, so it's worth considering.
"a group that makes up so little of the population manages to bully their way into our lives." Bolshevikian.
ReplyDeleteTo put it another way, for such little population it was amazing the way the police used to bully themselves into our lives and bust our heads and arrest us and throw us in jail during the "good old days." To which some actually want to return to (Rick Santorum, being but one,) and which just two years ago the Ft. Worth TX police felt just fine in continuing the tradition and sent 30 officers to beat the living snot out of 9 gay guys in a bar, to the point that one is still in rehab. Quite a bit of "bully" going on in "our lives" indeed. That might suppress a count too, you know.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, me, everyone else, and even the Wall Street Journal concluded that the Gates study was flawed because Gates only counted up the numbers from five previous flawed studies with no new research whatsoever, to get next year's grant money -- and a quick survey of the 2500 gay bars in the nation, and all the gay events, (and only one of which is like the Folsom event, itself, and the rest a church mom and child could attend, as they often do, like in say, Florence Alabama,) and you come up with more like 7% of the population, but no one really counts us where gays are -- they call up houses and ask "Any gays there?" Gates is so flawed it's absurd.
But we garner so much attention because we are embedded into "our" national lives because we show up in the strangest way -- usually one per family -- all across America. Like autistic kids, one never knows who'll get a gay kid.
But the real reason we're getting so much attention right now is that the nation is having one hell of a conversation about us. We asked to be left alone, serve in the military, have whatever sort of civil union we can get, not have our heads busted, and just sit in a park holding hands and smelling roses -- and you all have been debating it now for forty years.
When you're done debating it, and we a little respect and decency, and not calls for our extermination (see Family Research Council -- they make a living off of demanding I join their "church" and "cure" myself, and I suppose "marry their sister," or they threaten to "export" me) -- then we shall all disappear from the public stage pretty much, except where we are in our families with mom and dad, etc, and perhaps a small announcement in a willing paper that Jim and Mike are getting hitched.
And when you're all done with us, make sure you find out who murdered 32 gay men in New Orleans in 1973 when someone firebombed a church service held at a gay bar because we weren't allowed in churches at all, and the crime remains unsolved to this day. That was a bit of "bully into our lives" that warrants attention from Cold Case Files indeed.
By the way, recent Gallop Surveys show that 1/2 the nation thinks Obama is a good president -- which I suppose doesn't say much for either the surveys or the population.
ReplyDeleteFear not, I'm just another one of the growing number of gay Palinistas; why, she might be the first woman I ever considered loving, dating or voting for. And I'm sure she could use a gloss of 3.5% of the vote, and from the other 3.5% of us not counted too.