What portion of the population is gay?

The most cited statistic I know of comes from Kinsey, who is often reported as saying that 10% of the population is homosexual. Strictly speaking, Kinsey’s actual claim was that only 5–10% of the population could be expected to fall at the high end of his scale given the results of his research. His numbers on other issues have often been borne out by subsequent researchers, which makes it tempting to accept this statistic. But Kinsey admittedly focused on getting as many interviews as possible rather than trying to get a representative sample, and this is a difficult issue when it comes to collecting reliable data.

Wikipedia has a roundup of some of the more recent data. But it also highlights some of the difficulties involved: reports that rely on how one self-identifies do not get at the actual behavior patterns underlying that identification, whereas Kinsey assigned people to categories based on behavior regardless of self-identification. Two people with nearly identical behavioral patterns could be classified differently due to differences in how they self-identify or differences in how researchers define homosexuality. As such, I’m cautious about all of the numbers.

Of course there’s variation between the sexes as well. Apparently more men than women are homosexual, but that was mentioned in brief by a doctor in a lecture.

As @SavoirFaire mentioned, one problem with Kinsey’s 10% estimate was that he was basing it off behavior – if the men he interviewed had ever engaged in sexual activity with another man – and another researcher (Laumann, I believe) found that most of those men had engaged in such behavior before puberty and ended up growing up to be and identify as straight. According to the 2000 US census, about 2% of women and 4% of men identified as lesbian or gay. I don’t know about worldwide, though, if that’s what you were looking for. I tend to believe the actual numbers are only the slightest bit higher than the estimates…a joke among sociologists is that you can get anyone to tell you anything about their sex lives, but you’ll have the worst time getting information about their income. So I think the statistics about sexuality are a bit more reliable.

There isn’t any way to count gay people because we don’t know exactly what makes people gay. So it’s up to polls – and that itself is a guessing game. Who’s answering them truthful? Also, constitutes the ones who are “straight” but curious on the weekends?

So, I’m skeptical about any of the numbers; you can’t play “count the gays” the same way you could play “count the whites and blacks”. Either way, the window is going to be much larger than what the statistic represents.

I agree with @Disc2021 – I believe the number is higher than any number reported to date. Aside from the fact that there are many people who would never out themselves on those surveys and/or don’t feel there are categories representative of them. So there is that pesky matter of definition of gay and the matter of shouldn’t we expand these surveys to people who identify as non-straight? Besides, what is the point of these surveys anyhow if you’re not going to pay attention to how people self-identify?

What @Simone_De_Beauvoir said is really important when considering these things. Ways of categorizing and identifying are always sticky business. A friend of mine, who is an editor for a bi women’s newsletter, has written some really great pieces about categorization and exclusion of bisexuals within certain sections of the LGBT community. There apparently isn’t a consensus anywhere.

Here’s some stats which haven’t been brought up yet. I don’t know what they mean. But I thought I’d share them for the discussion.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad362.pdf

@bkcunningham Yeah, so that just covers people’s sexual activity which is only part of one’s sexuality as an identity. I know people who don’t have sex but aren’t straight – they would then raise up the number.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir so I suppose there are celibate people who are celibate for a variety of reasons. Yet they have a variety of inclinations, or no inclinations, for sex/identity/activity. Right?

@bkcunningham You are absolutely right.

@Frankie While it is true that Kinsey made his estimate based on behavior, it was not based on one-time behavior. That is to say, a single act of homosexual sex did not get someone classified as homosexual under his system (if it did, he would have reported that 37% of the population was homosexual). That was the whole point of having a scale, after all: it allowed people to be classified on a continuum rather than in binary terms.

The problem regarding self-identification arises with the way that other researchers classify their subjects. Self-identification as heterosexual is a personal choice. But as important as that choice may be for the individual, its scientific relevance is limited. Two people who have had the same number and distribution of partners (say, 2 males and 7 females in the same order and at the same times of their lives) could self-identify differently (one as heterosexual and the other as bisexual, for example). Kinsey’s classification schema is more useful if you are trying to make assessments about behavioral demographics, but the self-identification data is also interesting for various other purposes (especially when correlated with the behavioral data).