Myth: 10% of people are gay.
Fact: No one can be certain how many gay people there are, but its a helluva lot less than 10% of the population.
It's hard to find objective data, partly because sexuality is a subjective thing, and homosexuality is something that people are often less than truthful about, even in anonymous surveys.
Homosexuality is also something that people are passionate about, and both sides twist the truth to suit their own ends. This article from Family Voice cherry picks data from a university study to support their anti gay-rights agenda. Meanwhile, Out in Perth accurately quotes figures on gay partnerships from the Australian Bureau of Statistics... then shamelessly inflates auxilliary data to make those figures appear more impressive.
But one thing that we can say for certain after even a small amount of investigation is that the figure of 10% is utter bollocks.
A recent study by LaTrobe University in Victoria found that 1.6% of anonymously surveyed men identified as gay, and a further 0.9% identified as bisexual.
For the 10% figure to be even remotely accurate, one would have to assume that for every man who identified as gay or bisexual, there were three screaming queers who claimed to be completely straight. Even allowing for the closet cases and those in denial, that seems unlikely.
The LaTrobe study DID find that 8.6% of men confessed to at least one incidence of either a same sex experience or attraction. But a moment of sexual ambiguation does not equal being gay. And even if it did - if every man who'd ever had any sort of sexual experience with or attraction to a male was really deep down 100% gay - it's still only 8.6%.
Supporting the 1.6% figure are studies in mainland Europe, Britain and the United States, which found similar percentages to those found in Australia. Over such wide samples, the possibility of the figures being so significantly underreported is small, to say the least.
Of course all of this "X% of people are gay" stuff comes from a very binary conception of sexuality, whereas many of the more nuanced social researchers recognise a fluid spectrum of sexuality. However it would seem that the percentage of men who are what we'd consider "gay" at any given point in time would be somewhere between 1.6% and 8.6% of men. For myself, the figure of 3-4% that's occasionally quoted seems the most rational... although I have no stats to hand to back that up.
Fact: No one can be certain how many gay people there are, but its a helluva lot less than 10% of the population.
It's hard to find objective data, partly because sexuality is a subjective thing, and homosexuality is something that people are often less than truthful about, even in anonymous surveys.
Homosexuality is also something that people are passionate about, and both sides twist the truth to suit their own ends. This article from Family Voice cherry picks data from a university study to support their anti gay-rights agenda. Meanwhile, Out in Perth accurately quotes figures on gay partnerships from the Australian Bureau of Statistics... then shamelessly inflates auxilliary data to make those figures appear more impressive.
But one thing that we can say for certain after even a small amount of investigation is that the figure of 10% is utter bollocks.
A recent study by LaTrobe University in Victoria found that 1.6% of anonymously surveyed men identified as gay, and a further 0.9% identified as bisexual.
For the 10% figure to be even remotely accurate, one would have to assume that for every man who identified as gay or bisexual, there were three screaming queers who claimed to be completely straight. Even allowing for the closet cases and those in denial, that seems unlikely.
The LaTrobe study DID find that 8.6% of men confessed to at least one incidence of either a same sex experience or attraction. But a moment of sexual ambiguation does not equal being gay. And even if it did - if every man who'd ever had any sort of sexual experience with or attraction to a male was really deep down 100% gay - it's still only 8.6%.
Supporting the 1.6% figure are studies in mainland Europe, Britain and the United States, which found similar percentages to those found in Australia. Over such wide samples, the possibility of the figures being so significantly underreported is small, to say the least.
Of course all of this "X% of people are gay" stuff comes from a very binary conception of sexuality, whereas many of the more nuanced social researchers recognise a fluid spectrum of sexuality. However it would seem that the percentage of men who are what we'd consider "gay" at any given point in time would be somewhere between 1.6% and 8.6% of men. For myself, the figure of 3-4% that's occasionally quoted seems the most rational... although I have no stats to hand to back that up.
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