Do Gays and Lesbians Earn More Money?

Well, the short answer: NO. The long answer: maybe. A fellow blogger and podcamp’r sent me this article about such things.

Every year Rivendell Media puts out numbers like this showing the purchasing and advertising power of gays and lesbians. They look nice and pretty and might actually help in helping the GLBT community receive ad dollars. The major problem with such things is that we do not know one extremely important fact. How many gays and lesbians are out there? Without this information, there is NO way to determine an accurate sample size. It is true that survey accuracy is based on the total number of participants, but that gives us a few problems. How do we make sure that an adequate cross-section of the GLBT population was sampled if we don’t know where they live, etc.

How often have you heard of the 10% number? What am I talking about? If you don’t know, the oft misquoted “fact” is that 10% of the population is gay. From Alfred Kinsey’s revolutionary report of 1948, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, we get the following:

10 per cent of the males are more or less exclusively homosexual (i.e., rate 5 or 6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. This is one male in ten in the white male population.

The “5 or 6″ referred to talks about the famous Kinsey scale where gays and straights are rated on a scale of 0 through 6 with 0 being one who is exclusively heterosexual, 6 exclusively homosexual. This is STILL the best estimate of how many GLBT individuals exist in the United States. I have a very difficult believing any numbers like those presented in the story. Let’s just grow some balls and get the sexual orientation question on the US Census Survey for 2010. At least then the evil Republicans will now how many of us they piss off.

Today’s shirt: BACN!