Does the lesbian and gay community seriously account for 10% of the population?

The Gallup organization estimates in this 2002 article that 10% of the adult male population is gay. The number is less for adult women.

When I was dating it seemed like 90 percent of the women told me they were gay so your number could be a little low.
It’s friday late so I get a little looney. 10 percent sounds like it could be accurate.

0% in Iran, apparently.

Different sources place is from 2% to 15%. It all depends on definitions and disclosure. Many surveys don’t account for bisexual, fluid, queer people or genderqueer & trans folks. If all of our identities were taken into account and people felt safe disclosing, I’d say around 30% of the entire population is queer if not more.

How many straight couples have you seen kissing in the last couple of months, in the hotel?
Probably not dozens?
It is not, I believe, because you see only one gay couple kiss that all the other couples that you see (kissing or not) are all straight.
Plus, it is still, for some gays, in some countries, not that easy to come out.
So many ‘girl friends’ or ‘boy friends’ couples that you see might be gay/lesbian couples in reality.

Wouldn’t it seem the “definition” would be whatever someone identifies themselves as?

It’s sexuality, if I want to tell you toasters are the only thing that turns me on, how would you prove me wrong?

So, 10% is high I think because 10% of the population wouldn’t identify themselves as homosexual. It seems to 3–5% overall might be more accurate, but the variance is huge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientation

@rebbel The hotel is probably not a good pool, for 80% of the year it’s old couples in their 70’s. As for coming out in Spain, it’s not really a big deal, gay marriage is legal here. Just today me and a co-worker were joking about blowing each other for money.

As for hetero couples kissing in the hotel, waaaaay more than a dozen. A dozen a day maybe.

I get your point, I considered it my self, but it still seems a little odd.

One, it depends on where you live. In my little liberal, college populated hot spot in North Carolina, the percentage is probably quite a bit higher. Two, you have no way of knowing how many people you see are gay. Public displays of affection are not a reliable indicator.

Come to think of it… the new gay bar in town does seem to be making a lot of money, they always have clients, then again, I have been in there too and am not gay.

@thorninmud thing is in many Muslim nations, there’s apparently a difference between man screwing another man and a man loving another man. It’s apparently not homosexual if a man bangs a man solely for pleasure. Many see it as women are for baby making, men/boys/animals/etc are for pleasure.

I wonder if the number of live births per 100,000 has declined over the period during which gay and lesbian people have felt safer to self-identify.

I realize that relationship does not include all the kinds of people to whom @Simone_De_Beauvoir referred.

Does anybody know if there is a study that looked at that?

@Dr_Lawrence Or maybe it will go up if they feel safer in marriage and want kids? I don’t know the answer.

@poisonedantidote I get your point too, by the way.
I am from Holland, which is as liberal and gay friendly as Spain is, I think, and I had a similar thought today as you had.
Katrina & the Waves was on the radio and I asked one colleague if he knew if that particular song was a Eurovision Song Contest song.
He said that he didn’t know ‘because that Contest had been taken over by the gay community for the last ten years’ and thus he didn’t watch it.
I answered that you don’t have to be gay to know your pop culture trivia, and that was it.
But, I did think about the percentage because I thought about how a gay person in our workshop must have felt had he heard that ‘Eurovision-Gay’ remark.
Which made me think about the number of gay people we have working in our place.
(Supposedly) none.
And overall there are about twenty five people laboured here.
You’ld expect to find at least one gay person then.
But I think it is just statistics.
Apparently one in three persons will, at one point in their life, get cancer, yet from all the people that I know, or faintly know, much less than 33% have (had) cancer (to my idea it must be in the regions of 1 to 200.
Most probably I don’t have to say this but I will anyway: in no way am I saying that I see (having) cancer and being gay as similar, I merely used cancer to explain my idea about the statistics),

According to the latest reliable numbers, it is more like 3.8% are LGBT:

“Gates’ best estimate, derived from five studies that have asked subjects about their sexual orientation, is that the nation has about 4 million adults who identify as being gay or lesbian, representing 1.7 percent of the 18-and-over population.

Gates found, for example, that another 1.8 percent of the adult population, or a little more than 4 million Americans, identifies as bisexual, according to his research brief published Thursday by the Williams Institute.

Another two studies, conducted by state agencies in California and Massachusetts, yielded what Gates thinks is the first credible estimate of the nation’s transgender population. He puts it at about 700,000 adults, or 0.3 percent of the population.”

Huffington Post

@marinelife Here’s a decent rebuttal of any attempt by Gates to get at a number.

@poisonedantidote I have a question for you. Many people wonder how many queer people there are – and I wonder why wonder? I get that it’s important to get some kind of bracket for health research purposes or whatever but that’s not why most people care and why is there such a need to figure out just how many of us are ‘abnormal’? Should we care less about the politics associated with this population if they only make up 1% of the population on paper? That’s what I often hear when people don’t give two craps about intersex people but I say that they’re the most wrongfully affected by gender binaries and sexing the body than millions of others. So I don’t care how many people are straight or ‘normally’ sexed, I just care about the few that are screwed over because others perceive them as ‘not fitting in with our norms and categories.’

Why not wonder the way we wonder about anything else in life. Is curiosity not a good thing? It’s not a bad thing to try to figure out how demographics are calculated, how those numbers are arrived at.

Some aspects that probably make it really hard to calculate – there are many people who deny their sexual feelings because of their culture, shame, or embarassment. Maybe their parents goal for them was to get them married and living a “traditional” life. Maybe their own goals were to do the same and suppress any other feelings.

Maybe the percentages are based upon people who are bisexual being counted as “gay” given the choice between “straight” or “gay.” Maybe many of those are “hetero” 90% of the time and have gay tendencies 10% of the time, and given the choice straight or gay, are counted as gay.

@jca No, of course curiosity is good and some people are genuinely curious as to how many people are queer but I said, in my comment, that most people invested in this particular line of questioning have other motives – as if to say that the queer population is so small that we can safely ignore their issues and even go as far as to say that it’s quite abnormal to be queer and that’s it’s not natural, etc. At to the rest of your comment, I do think it’s important to question how any numbers whatsoever are arrived at.

In my ideal world, the percentage of people by sexual preference would never be up for discussion because the differences are just that…differences. It has always existed and will continue to be so.

@poisonedantidote To answer your last question, although I cannot speak to the 95% of the LGBT community still hide the fact Yes, there is still a fair amount of people who keep their sexual partner preference silent here in the US. I can count on one hand the number of fairly close friends that I’ve never seen or heard speak of a love interest.

@King_Pariah Your post is intriguing. After spending a week in a Muslim country earlier this year and reading a bunch of travel guides before going, homosexuality is taboo in the Muslim religion. It sounds like you are saying that the religion differentiates between a sexual act and affection. Is this the case? If so, I would be interested in hearing more about it. Do you have any sources?

@Pied_Pfeffer First hand experience and (I know it may seem unreliable) second sources from those who’ve interacted with Muslims on a face to face level whether they be relief workers, contractors, enlisted, or commissioned. Also, if you read the Quran, you’ll find that there are some verses that point out that martyrs have a choice between beautiful male youths and female virgins. True they can’t screw any guy, it’s really only tolerated between a grown man and a boy (normally between the ages of 7–15) or a more effeminate man.

Oh, how did I forget? If I find it, I’ll post it, but there are several reports from British military forces regarding the witnessing of “boy play” or bache bazi and I do believe these reports include the bestial aspect as well. Though it is “illegal,” it’s extremely common

@Simone_De_Beauvoir You are talking with someone who is capable of spending three hours online trying to find out how they put holes in needles just because I had a hole in my trousers that day. I wonder all kinds of strange things.

If there is 1 gay person or 6.2 billion, it has no affect at all on how I view them in terms of rights and politics. I’m all in favor of equal rights.

@poisonedantidote Cool, :)