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Marriage Champions Quiz ANSWERS
Our latest marriage quiz had a great turn-out in respondents. Thank you to everyone who participated. Here again is the question, followed by the answers.
Question: What percentage of the population is gay?
A. 10%
B. 3%
C. Less than 1%
D. None of the above.
Answer: This is a trick question! The correct answer is: it all depends on what you mean by “gay.” Is it exclusive sexual activity, recent sexual activity, sexual desire, self-identification, or some combination of these? The percent gay also depends on whether you are talking about men or women, as well as a bunch of other factors. You can make a case for several different numbers.
A. There is virtually no case for Answer A, 10%. The “10% of the population is gay” figure that is so commonly thrown around comes from Alfred Kinsey’s study. Kinsey’s study was flawed because he used a non-representative sample. He also used an open-ended interview, which means he did not have a fixed set of questions he asked each person. It has never been remotely replicated as a figure for the general population. His work is criticized extensively in the Lauman et. al study cited below.
B. The case for 3%, answer B, comes from a very recent study by The Williams Institute, at UCLA Law School. The Williams Institute is a pro-gay think tank, devoted to studying gay and lesbian issues. They estimate that in 2005, there were about 8.8 million gay, lesbian and bisexual people in the US. (Census Snapshot, The Williams Institute, December 2007). That same year, according to the US Census Bureau Population Estimates Program, the total population of the US was 295,560,549, or approximately 295.6 million. Therefore, according to those figures, the total percentage of the population that was gay, lesbian or bisexual was right around 3%. (8.8 million/295.6 million = 2.977%.)
C. You can get an answer of less than 1%, by asking the following question: what percent of the population has had exclusively same sex partners since puberty? According to data from the 1990’s, (admittedly a bit dated) .2% of women and .6% of men had exclusively same sex partners since puberty. This would be the most rigorous definition. It rules out the person who experiments, dabbles or is confused. This data is worth taking seriously, since it is the exhaustive, University of Chicago study, "The Social organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States" (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994) by Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels.
Another compilation of data from roughly the same time frame found that 1.4% of women and 2.5% of men had exclusively same sex partners over the last five years. This result makes sense in conjunction with the previous result. A little bit higher percentage of people had exclusively same sex partners over the shorter period of time. [Dan Black, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders and Lowell Taylor, “Demographics of the Gay and Lesbian Population in the United States: Evidence from Available Systematic Data Sources,” Demography, vol 37, No. 2 (May, 2000) 139-154.]
D. The case for None of the Above now totally makes sense, doesn’t it? It depends on what population you are looking at. Did you notice that every number I quoted above was different between men and women? Pretty much everyone who studies this topic, looks at men and women separately. That’s because gender keeps showing up in the data as important. For instance, in the Gates et al study, only .6% of the female population self-identifies as lesbian, while three times as many men, 1.8%, describe themselves as gay.
Other variables matter as well. Just to give another, completely different example, the percentage of men who self-identified as gay varies with the size of the city you currently live in, and the size of the city you lived in at age 16! Of men currently living in the 12 largest cities, 14.3% had some same sex partners in the last 5 years. And of men who lived in urban areas between the ages of 14 and 16, 7% have had same sex partners in the last 5 years.
This is probably way more than you wanted to know! But the point is that this question is not as simple as we sometimes suppose.
Check out the other Marriage Champions Quizes. Forward the link to quiz your friends!
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