Myth No. 2

Myth: Gay people want to be married to the person they love!

Fact: Gay people want other gay people to be able to be married to the person they love. As long as they don't actually, you know, go through with it.

In the Australian census of 2006, only 50,000 adults out of 17,000,000 (or 1 in 340) reported being in a same sex partnership. This compares to 203 in 340 reporting being in a straight partnership. If partnering rates were the same in gay Australia as they are in straight Australia, we'd expect to see at least another 200,000 gay couples flouncing about. But as it is, the rate is running at about 20% of all gay adults (assuming a very conservative rate of homosexuality at 2.5%).

There may well be a few militant gay couples who refuse to acknowledge their relationship until they are allowed to call it a "marriage". But they would be nowhere near numerous enough to explain this discrepancy.

So what does explain this discrepancy? At first I wondered if the absence of a female in the relationship removed some of the drive to settle down and make a nest. But if that were the case, one would expect to see much higher partnership rates for lesbians... and they're not there. Partnership rates between gay men and between lesbians are roughly similar.

More likely, it would seem, is a combination of two primary factors. One, it's harder to find a compatible mate when your sexual orientation is limited to a tiny minority of the population. And two, homosexuals don't experience the same social imperatives to partner up and reproduce the families that created them. Sure, a mother might nag her gay son to find someone and settle down, but it won't have the same force behind it as her nagging of her straight son to marry his girlfriend and start popping out grandchildren. In the latter situation, she sees strong echoes of her own experience and priorities. In the former, the correlations to her own experience are more muted.

I use the mother here as an example, but the social pressure to follow the traditional familial and reproductive narrative comes from every part of our culture. And it's directed at the straights; it's merely coopted by the gays, and not, apparently, in large numbers.

Myth No. 1

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.

Like Mythbusters, only with more penises.

Partly for my own amusement, and due to a vague sense that I wasn't getting the unbiased story, I've done some research into facts and figures about gays in the modern world.

After going over as much data as I can find, as objectively as I can, I'm made three discoveries:

1. It's very difficult to pin down solid demographic data on homosexuality.

2. Many assumptions we make about gay experience and relationships are based on false and/or outdated information.

3. I am a massive statistics nerd.

So over the next few posts I'm going to present some of my findings, in the hopes that they may give a better understanding of what's actually going on in the realm of gay relationships.

Basket of goodies

Damn it, why can I never find this aisle when I go grocery shopping?



The last time I went to the supermarket all I got was corn chips.