Gallup.
Once again, I have decided to wade into the cultural segment of my blog and talk about an issue that is sure to gather no controversy whatsoever. That's right, I am going to talk about homosexuality. To be clear this post isn't going to be about the morality of it or whether gays can get married or not. In theory, this post should be accessible to both sides of the debate and is about something only tangentially related to gay rights. It's going to be an article about statistics.
For those of you still here, what is this about? The other day I was looking for news articles and I found some headlines that sounded odd. It was about how people in America vastly overestimate the amount of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders in the country. You can see some of the figures in the image above but the whole report from Gallup is here.
In short, gays only make up about 3.8% of the population. That's it. Now that number seems about right to me. If you had asked me before this article what the proportion of homosexuals in America are I would have said less then 5%. But according to the polling, most people (53%) think that more than 20% of the population are gay with 33% of people saying that gays are more then 25% of the entire population. Only 9% got the correct response of less then five.
Needless to say I thought this is really weird. Gays being 20-25% of the population is completely different from my experiences. That isn't to say that I don't know any gay people. I knew a couple in high school, including one that came out later, a few more in college and a few now at work. The total number of gay men I have known, been friends with, or worked with is barely in the double digits. I'm not sure I have ever even met an actual lesbian, though I met a couple women that said they were bisexual. And if I have ever met a transsexual I didn't notice. If anything gays have been underrepresented in my life by quite a bit. If the 3.8% number is true I should know a few more, but that probably has more to do with introversion then anything else.
But if the number of gays was 25% that would have meant that that in a college class room of 100 people, 25 of them should have been LGBT. Not that it would necessarily be obvious, but you would think that with numbers like that I would have seen a lot more gay couples in school then I did. At that rate it shouldn't have been unusual to see gay couples holding hands or kissing, but I can't say that I ever say that in college. And I would say that my campus was relatively tolerant of homosexuals. The only exception was seeing girls kissing each other in bars, but for the most part those women identified as straight.
So how are Americans getting such crazy numbers? I'm aware enough that my experience probably isn't the typical one but apparently everyone else isn't. There are a lot of factors that could be in play here and I want to go through a lot of them. Most of this speculation on my part.
1.The entertainment media hypes up the presence of homosexuals. They are over-represented there compared to their proportion in real life.
This is the knee jerk conservative argument that I saw a couple of times while I was researching this post. I'm not sure how true it is though. I tend to think that the media has less of an impact on peoples beliefs then anyone likes to admit.
Sure the bias is there, gays sure seem to be over-represented in media, but it really depends on what media you are talking about. There are a lot of gay people, and forgive the stereotype, on television shows about fashion then there are on shows about sports. You watch an NFL football game and gays don't exist, but if you watch MTV they are everywhere. I think you could argue that gays are over-represented in sitcoms and scripted dramas due to token characters, but even if that is true, would that really result in numbers this high? Off the top of my head the last few shows that I saw that had a gay character or characters didn't really have them over-represented except in cases where there was a very small cast. Most of the time, if they were over-represented at all, it was closer to a more reasonable 10% number then the crazy 20-25% number.
I think that gays in the media could have some effect on the number but it doesn't explain all of it and it doesn't explain why it is as off as it is. Either way, I don't put too much stock in the conservative argument that the numbers are higher because of media "brainwashing". If anything I think the higher numbers of gays in the entertainment is a result of the misconception, not the cause. It may feed into itself a little bit, but the issue started elsewhere.
2. Gay rights is the hot button issue right now. They show up all the time in the news
It's clear that gay rights is a major wedge issue right now and the media loves to talk about it 24/7/365. It's hard to go a day without hearing a major story about gay rights. Indeed, most news outlets have whole sections of their websites dedicated to gay news.
This makes it easy to think gay people are more common then they actually are. After all, why would anyone make such a huge deal over gay rights if they weren't a major part of the population? Both sides of the gay marriage debate benefit from exaggerating the numbers of gay people. For gay rights supporters, making it seem like that gays are as much as 25% of the population means that any imposition on their community effects way more people then it actually does. And gay rights opponents get the psychological high from feeling like they are outnumbered and that their argument about gays taking over is actually happening.
In truth both sides are pretty far from reality. Unlike other people, I don't think this is some kind of crazy conspiracy theory, but the natural tendency to think that both things you like and things you hate are more common then they actually are. Exaggeration in arguments are extremely common, so you would expect to see the numbers a bit higher then they actually are. Even so, it still doesn't quite explain how people get the numbers wrong by so much.
3. Gay people tend to self segregate so they look more populous then they are.
To explain this one lets look at two communities. The first one is a stereotypical small town. It's got a low population and is very religious. There is little to no diversity (though that doesn't mean they are all white just that whatever race is there is the only one). Everyone knows each other and everyone judges everyone. Everyone votes for Republicans (unless, they are a non-white community). People that don't fit in will probably have a very hard time.
The second one is a major metropolitan city. Think New York or San Francisco. It's got thousands of people and there is a ton of diversity. You can walk for hours and never see anyone you know. There is a ton of diversity, though people tend to stay with people that look, think and believe like them. Almost everyone votes for Democrats regardless of which race they are.
I think it is pretty obvious where the gay person is going to end up. They aren't going to stay in small town USA. They are going to go to a large city like New York or San Francisco. Places that have a thriving gay community. Not just because of discrimination, but for more chances of meeting mates and the sense of community that living with people that resemble you gives. This is going to happen again and again until the point where the 25% number starts to make sense. Indeed, Wikipedia has a whole article about these kinds of "gay villages". They list the gay population of San Francisco as 15% and New York, which is 6% gay, has the largest total number of gays in the country.
So what do you think happens to members of those communities that have a larger population of gays? They overestimate the number of gays in the entire country. It also helps to explain some of the differences between liberals and conservatives in the Gallup poll. Obviously, if there are fewer gays in the small towns, which are mostly Republican, Republicans are going to estimate fewer gay people.
Gallup.
Still, this doesn't explain all of it. Even in San Francisco, the estimated number of homosexuals is higher then it should be. There is still a 5 to 10% gap in the numbers.
4. The number of gays is higher then self identified polling reveals
The argument here is that there are still a ton of closeted LGBT people. While I am sure there are still some people that haven't come out of the closet, the numbers don't seem to have changed all that much. After all, acceptance of homosexuals is about as high as it has ever been. If people being closeted was an issue, the numbers gays in surveys should have gone up. From the statistics I saw on Wikipedia, the number of gays has stayed pretty steady between 3 and 6% with a few studies finding a little less or a little more then that, with little variation over time. I don't give much credence for this argument, which I would expect those on the left to make.
5. People aren't defining gay the same way.
Quick question. Is a man that had 100 sexual partners in his life, and 99 of them were women, gay, straight or bisexual? How about all those girls in college that I knew that would happily make out with a girl in a bar but would never have sex with one? Were they straight, gay or bisexual? Does it matter what they say or do we just know what their sexuality is by their actions? Does self reporting matter? And lets not even get into the sexuality involved when one partner is transgender...
I think the problem here is that people tend to think that being gay is like losing your virginity. Once you have done it you lose your status as a heterosexual. This is especially true for men, though it really doesn't seem to apply to women. After all it's almost expected for women to experiment in college and still be regarded as straight, but for a man to even give a sideways glance at a man is to be forever labeled gay. The popular meme is that male bisexuals do not exist and you are either gay or straight with nothing in between. There is a double standard here but I can't for the life of me figure out what it means
I do think that this could lead to people overestimating the number of gay men at least. If your definition of gay is not "dates exclusively members of the same sex" but "anyone who has ever done anything even remotely sexual with a member of the same sex" you are going to get higher numbers.
On the other hand, I have never heard any man claim to have had consensual sexual contact with a man that wasn't gay, so I have no idea how common this kind of conduct is. It just isn't talked about in polite society, and to be completely honest, I am fine with that. Without that information it is really hard to figure out how much of an impact this belief has.
6. People are just bad at statistics.
This is probably the largest factor by far. It's no coincidence that Gallup also claims that people vastly overestimate Blacks and Hispanics as well. People are just really bad at math. When you ask people "what's a good percentage for a group of people that are fairly common, but not a majority" most of them would probably say 25% Some of them might say 33%. You probably aren't going to find too many numbers that are different then that, with the possible exception of 10%. I can't prove that empirically but my gut tells me that this is a major factor here.
I don't think this is a full picture but I just don't know enough about gay people to go into this any further. Still, thinking about this changed some of my own beliefs. I never realized that people thought that there were so many gay people in America. I did think that people thought that the number was a lot closer to 10%, which is still too high, but 20% and up just shocked me.
And I really think that this has an impact on the way America works. If people really believe that LGBT is 25% of the population, that is going to change the way people think of gay people. Not necessarily in the way gay people want, or the way conservative Christians want for that matter, but change it will. If nothing else our reasoning about gay rights is wrong if people are using the inaccurate numbers as their basis of argument. Regardless if you agree with their conclusions, a bad argument based on incorrect data should be fought no matter what. Even if it hurts your political position.
So what was the point of this post? I don't have an agenda either way about gay rights, it's an issue that largely doesn't interest me. But I do believe in truth. People should have an accurate view of the world. Make a liberal argument or a conservative argument if you want. Ban gay marriage? Legalize it? Either way, use real numbers and adjust your views after finding out that your beliefs about the number of gays is wrong, if it was wrong in the first place. I don't care if these numbers help or hurt your worldview, but people need to know the truth. Even if the truth isn't something they want to hear...
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