Oh, to be the meat in this sandwich...

Just when I think that I couldn't be more turned on...

I notice that sexy, quizzical little lift of his eyebrow and the lust fires even higher.

Myth No. 3

Myth: There's nothing unusual about a child being raised by two daddies.

Fact: It's so rare that the figures barely register as statistics.

I was intrigued to read a factoid recently about the number of children being raised by gay couples. Despite what fashionable TV shows depict, the numbers are tiny - in Australia, fewer than three children in a thousand, or 0.3%, are being raised by a same sex couple.

Also interestingly, the vast majority of those children are being raised by lesbians, and the vast majority of those children being raised by lesbians are the biological children of one of the lesbian parents. It's hard to find definitive statistics, but it would appear that for every nine children with two mothers there is only one with two fathers.

As such, the popular image of two gay men with their adopted child is about as common as being struck by lightning. To put it into perspective: I live in a city of two million people, including around four hundred thousand children. Statistically, this means that in this entire city there are maybe three dozen children with two daddies... barely enough to fill a typical primary school classroom.

And furthermore, that three dozen is actually dominated by gay men raising their biological children from a previous straight relationship with a new boyfriend, not by two gay men choosing to have a child together.

There were some other interesting facts that came to light during my googling around. In the US, which has a far higher adoption rate than Australia, around 1 in every 780 children is being raised by either a gay male couple or a single gay male. But 1 in 234 is being raised by either a lesbian couple or a single lesbian. Given that lesbians can generate their own children without much fuss, while gay men can only get a child by taking it away from somebody else, this discrepancy is hardly surprising.

I found this graph fascinating too.

In the US, 22% of children in same sex parented households are not adopted or fostered, and are not the offspring or step-children of the householder. Which leaves... what? I assume scenarios like younger siblings being raised by an older brother and his boyfriend after the loss of their parents. Or a gay couple taking in a teenaged gay boy thrown out by his family. Or a high school student living with her gay uncle and his partner while she goes to a good school because her parents live in a one horse town in the middle of nowhere.

It's hard to draw any precise conclusions from these figures, since the data is ambiguous, reliant on a lot of self-identifying, and based on tiny sample groups. It's worth noting that in one study of the US census, it was suspected that nearly half of the same sex couples identified were in fact coding errors; that is, idiots in heterosexual relationships ticking the wrong box.

The other interesting observation I read was that since lesbians overwhelming dominate same sex parenting, most data about the outcomes of children raised by "homosexuals" is primarily about children raised by lesbians. Gay male couples who parent are actually so rare that there really isn't any specific evidence of positive or negative outcomes for the children in their care, despite the statements made by both gay activists or anti-gay activists.

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.

Turns out the GTR Test is even more depressing than the Bechdel Test

Further to my last post, about the difficulties of trying to date men with 1) a job, 2) a place and 3) a car, I've had a rather startling realisation.

I wrote down the names of my seven closest single gay friends, the ones I see at least every couple of months. Of those seven, only two had a job, a place and a car.

And if we redefine place to mean, "a place they can actually invite people back to", the number drops to zero.

Zero. Out of my primary gay social circle, I'm the only one with a job, a place and a car.

To really grind my face into the raw concrete of failure, I then ran the test on my coupled gay friends.

To a man, every one of them has a job, a place and a car. And, obviously, a partner.

W. Somerset Maugham once refered to himself as being "first among the second raters" as a writer. Apparently I hold a similar title in dating. I really am the King of the Losers.