The Kinsey scale

Drawn by M diMotta  (click to enlarge)

The truth is that in a world where being gay wasn't considered wrong or "unChristian" far more people would be in the middle categories from 1 to 5.  Why wouldn't you make out with a man you're fond of?  Of course, you might just love him and not find him sexually attractive.  But equally, if same-sex love was as accepted as other-sex love, you might well enjoy a male sparring partner.  Most people would prolly remain "wired" as straight, but a significant minority would not.  Once you stop accepting the orthodoxy, once you step outside of conformity, anything is possible.  Which, naturally, is why conservatives hate it.

Is 10% of the population gay?

Alfred Kinsey

David Spiegelhalter in a Guardian article analyses new statistics which suggest that that's not a bad guess.  But it's a question of definition.  Which is pretty much what I've been saying for a few years now.


For a single statistic to be the primary propaganda weapon for a radical political movement is unusual. Back in 1977, the US National Gay Task Force (NGTF) was invited into the White House to meet President Jimmy Carter’s representatives – a first for gay and lesbian groups. The NGTF’s most prominent campaigning slogan was “we are everywhere”, backed up by the memorable statistical claim that one in 10 of the US population was gay – this figure was deeply and passionately contested.

So where did Bruce Voeller, a scientist who was a founder and first director of the NGTF, get this nice round 10% from? To find out, we have to delve back into Alfred Kinsey’s surveys in 1940s America, which were groundbreaking at the time but are now seen as archaic in their methods: he sought out respondents in prisons and the gay underworld, made friends with them and, over a cigarette, noted down their behaviours using an obscure code. Kinsey did not believe that sexual identity was fixed and simply categorised, and perhaps his most lasting contribution was his scale, still used today, in which individuals are rated from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual on a scale of 0 to 6.

Kinsey’s headline finding was that “at least 37% of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age”, meaning physical contact to the point of orgasm. He claimed that 13% of males were predominately homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55 (scoring at least 4) and that 4% of males were exclusively homosexual all their lives (scoring 6). For 30-year-old US men, he estimated that 83% would score 0 (totally heterosexual), 8% would be 1 or 2 on the scale, and 9% would be at least a 3. He acknowledged that people could move on the scale during their lifetime, and indeed Kinsey himself is said to have moved from a 1 or 2 when younger to a 3 or 4 in middle age.

When he published his study on women in 1953, Kinsey estimated that 20% of women had had some same-sex experience and 13% to orgasm. In unmarried females between the ages of 20 and 35, he claimed there was at least some homosexual experience in 11%-20%, and 1%-3% were exclusively homosexual.
So, in 1973, when Voeller was putting together the NGTF campaign, he went back to Kinsey’s estimates for those with predominantly homosexual experience (4 to 6 on his scale) for at least three years. As this was around 7% for women and 13% for men he took an average to get the headline figure: 10% of the population was gay.

This 10% claim was controversial, to say the least, and reignited old arguments about Kinsey’s poor survey methods. But even cleaned-up data gave similar answers, and Voeller stuck to the 10%, stating in 1990 that “the concept that 10% of the population is gay has become a generally accepted ‘fact’… As with so many pieces of knowledge (and myths), repeated telling made it so.”

However, later surveys gave much lower results, and of course the ChrisTaliban seized on them as proof that gays don't need rights (as if Jews, for example, who are much less numerous, shouldn't have rights either because there are so few of them)

The explanation lay in the terminology.  If you ask ppl whether they're "gay" or "lesbian" or "bi"  most say no.  Even if they have had same-sex experiences to orgasm.  

Same-sex sexual behaviour can come in all degrees of intensity. So Natsal carefully distinguishes a “same-sex experience”, which could be just a smooch in the dark, from a “same-sex partner”, who is someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm. Respondents are asked about activity at any age, so adolescent fumblings counted.

For women in the age range 16 to 44, the proportion who report having had some same-sex experience has shown a dramatic rise over the past 20 years: from 4% in 1990 to 10% in 2000, and to 16% in 2010 – a massive change in behaviour over such a short period. But this is not all just girls kissing girls in imitation of Madonna and Britney Spears; around half report genital contact, and around half of these in the past five years, so that overall nearly one in 20 women report a same-sex partner in the past five years.

But has there really been a change, or are women simply more willing to report what they get up to? Using some neat cross-checking, Natsal reckons that the change between 1990 and 2000 was partly due to more honest reporting, but the rise in 2000 and 2010 was all real.

And it is clear that there is a lot of experimental activity – roughly, for each woman who has had a recent same-sex partner there are two more of the same age who have had some same-sex contact in their lives, but no partner in the past five years.

Men show a different pattern. In 2010, about 8% of 16- to 44-year-old men reported having had a same-sex experience: this is higher than in 1990, possibly associated with both better reporting and the decline in fear of HIV, but there have been no substantial recent changes.

Overall the proportion of people with same-sex experience is far higher than the proportion who identify themselves as gay and bisexual. This must mean that many same-sex contacts are by people who do not consider themselves gay or bisexual. That’s just what we find in reputable surveys: in the last big US survey, 10% of women and 3% of men who identified themselves as “heterosexual” also reported a same‑sex contact.

Read more here.

Other pieces about this:

How many of us are there?

How many American Men are Gay?

What makes us gay?

The Cum-and-Go Culture

I kiss them because I love them

Labels

How Many American Men are Gay?

An interesting stab at a number.

The author of the New York Times piece comes up with roughly 5% (Note that he assumes that there are gays and then there are straights and nothing in between): 

There are three sources that can give us estimates of the openly gay population broken down by state: the census, which asks about same-sex households; Gallup, which has fairly large-sample surveys for every state; and Facebook, which asks members what gender they are interested in. While these data sources all measure different degrees of openness, one result is strikingly similar: All three suggest that the openly gay population is dramatically higher in more tolerant states, defined using an estimate by Nate Silver of support for same-sex marriage. On Facebook, for example, about 1 percent of men in Mississippi who list a gender preference say that they are interested in men; in California, more than 3 percent do.

Are there really so many fewer gay men living in less tolerant states? There is no evidence that gay men would be less likely to be born in these states. Have many of them moved to more tolerant areas? Some have, but Facebook data show that mobility can explain only a small fraction of the difference in the totally out population. I searched gay and straight men by state of birth and state of current residence. (This information is available only for a subset of Facebook users.) Some gay men do move out of less tolerant states, but this effect is small. I estimate that the openly gay population would be about 0.1 percentage points higher in the least tolerant states if everyone stayed in place.

The percent of male high school students who identify themselves as gay on Facebook is also much lower in less tolerant areas. Because high school students are less mobile than adults, this suggests that a gay exodus from these areas is not a large factor.

We can approach the question of whether intolerant areas actually have fewer gay men another way, too, by estimating the percent of searches for pornography that are looking for depictions of gay men. These would include searches for such terms as “gay porn” or “Rocket Tube,” a popular gay pornographic site. I used anonymous, aggregate data from Google. The advantage of this data source, of course, is that most men are making these searches in private. (Women search, too, but in much smaller numbers.)

While tolerant states have a slightly higher percentage of these searches, roughly 5 percent of pornographic searches are looking for depictions of gay men in all states. This again suggests that there are just about as many gay men in less tolerant states as there are anywhere else.

Read more here.   

And this graphic is very telling.

How many of us are there?

One of the reasons I invented the portmanteau term "gay-shaded" is that there are so many variants of gay.  There are the guys who are born gay.  There are guys who "fool around" at school and uni.  There are bisexuals who like both genders but stay married to one or the other and remain faithful to the one they've chosen.  There are guys who have a relationship with one gender for a while then with another after that.  There are blokes who maintain they're straight but regularly have sex with men.  There are straight men who fall in love with their best friends to the extent that they end up having a sexual relationship with them, and even marry them. Or homophobes who turn out to be having sex with men on the side. 

Gay men are queeny.  Or hypermasculine.  Or just like other blokes.  Stuff the clichés!  There is no "normality".  There's just varying degrees of gay-shadedness.  Some men are fully pink, others are pinkish and other just tinged a little pink. It really is a rainbow!

Those who hate us and get their knickers in a twist about us maintain that only a small percentage of the population is gay -- 1 or 2 or 3 per cent.  As if it matters!  The Jews form just 0.6% of the UK's population, 1.7% of the United States'.  Would discrimination against them be acceptable?

On the other hand, there are much higher estimates out there.   The Kinsey report said:

25 per cent of the male population has more than incidental homosexual experience or reactions (i.e. rates 2-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. In terms of averages, one male out of approximately every four has had or will have such a distinct and continued homosexual experience.

And it's entirely possible that the numbers would remain high even after the teens and twenties except that most of these guys get married, and remain faithful to their wives.  Why should you suddenly stop finding guys lovable and sexy just because you've turned 30?

This report made me think again about how many of us there are.  People don't tell the truth in surveys.  They won't admit to being gay or gay-shaded if the milieu they move in regards being gay as shameful or evil.  So Gaydar's 2.2 million UK members, just under 7% of the UK's population is a more plausible percentage than the Statistics Department's 1.5%.  And don't forget the 10% of the "straight" male population who have sex with blokes.  Meanwhile, the UK government actuary estimates gays and lesbians and bi's at around 6% of the population.

I have no idea just how many of us there are.  Unlike the ChrisTaliban, I don't think you can tell who's gay and who isn't.  Maybe we're "just" 6 % of the population.  Or maybe, in a world where there was no shame or blame in being gay-shaded, we might be around the 20 to 25% mark, making love to and falling in love with men or women as our fancy took us.  I strongly suspect the latter is true.  I've met too many guys who, once they shed their own internalised homophobia, and decided that they were cool with loving another man, to believe that gay-shadedness isn't normal for our species, in the absence of the religious nutters and mouth breathers.

Chris Newman

A footy player (i.e., not a rugby player and not a soccer player. We have three distinct football codes in Oz.)

I like the way he wears tights during practice, without that horrible "modesty" which makes many footy players wear shorts over their tights.

He's far from pretty, but still, well, um... interesting. A manly sexiness.

Just for the record: though he appears on this blog, I have no idea whether he's gay or has ever even quietly fancied another bloke. The Kinsey report said 37% of the total male population had at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age. 37%!!!! Not just thoughts. Orgasm. ORGASM. Isn't that an amazing statistic to bash the Christian-Fascists with? Just think of this: every third guy you see on the street has had sex with another guy at some time in his life.

It's a gay old world, isn't it? Or at least, a bi one. Tell that to Jason Akermanis. But this bloke (and Jasie, too) belong most probably to the roughly two-thirds of all males who are resolutely straight. Just thought I'd get that out of the way in case somebody thinks I'm suggesting they're gay because they appear on this blog.