Three-score and eighteen days ago on January 5, 1948, the W. B. Saunders Company of Philadelphia published, in association with Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation, the pivotal tome Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell R. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. I purchased a copy of the eleventh printing of this book on eBay for about $13.00 a few years ago. I’ll be covering several aspects of importance to LGBT community members in my next few posts.
The so-called “Kinsey Report” has been acknowledged in a song, in at least one movie, and was a bestseller in its time. People craved information about sex. They ate up the shocking revelations page by page. It’s also the source of a sore spot with me, the “fact” that 10% of American males are gay.
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.
Can’t we get a more updated number? Do we really know what percentage of all men are gay? Sixty years ago the numbers said that about 10% of white males were gay. What do those numbers say today? Well, I don’t know. You see, most of the statistics you Google up are put together by ultra-conservative, anti-gay groups. Many of the gay sites quote these statistics. I would like to see a credible study performed to show us the truth. Many of the numbers quoted are also biased towards lower numbers. Could Kinsey have been right?
Well, you see, the Kinsey number is taken way out of context. First, a nice round number was chosen. We could spin the report to say that 25% of males are gay. In Kinsey’s words, “25 per cent of the male population has more than incidental homosexual experiences or reactions.” Really? That makes the figures even more interesting.
Here’s the real fact folks: We just don’t know how many GLBT people are in this country just as we don’t know how many illegal immigrants reside here. It’s that simple. But, if you follow the estimates, gay men alone top ALL illegal immigrants by at least 3 million people. Let’s stop this 10% bullshit and do a real study that’s even less biased than Kinsey’s and get the truth on something that plagues us all. How many of us are there? Were you gay 60 years ago? Are more people likely today to answer truthfully? Will that skew the numbers higher? What do you think?
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