The ’10 Percent Gay’ Myth Is Dead

[warwulf]

The ’10 Percent Gay’ Myth Is Dead – Just 1.6 Percent of U.S. Adults Identify as Gay or Lesbian, and .7 Percent as Bisexual, Major Federal Survey Finds

New government data show homosexuality is far less common than most LGBT activists claimed for decades, and a fraction of what most Americans believe

Homosexual activist Kevin Jennings is just one of many homosexual activists who used the "10 Percent" myth, rooted in Alfred Kinsey's discredited research, to exaggerate the number of homosexuals in America.
A Convenient Lie: Homosexual activist Kevin Jennings is just one of many homosexual activists who used the “10 Percent” myth, rooted in Alfred Kinsey’s discredited research, to greatly exaggerate the number of homosexuals in America. Jennings’ book title would be far less compelling if it were “One Teacher in 45,” to better represent the actual number of homosexuals and bisexuals in society.

Part One

By Peter LaBarbera, AFTAH Special Report

The first-ever major U.S. Government survey to present “nationally representative data on sexual orientation” finds that only 1.6 percent of Americans identify as “gay” or “lesbian,” while .7 percent identify as “bisexual.” This is about considerably less than the much-ballyhooed, decades-old LGBT claim that 10 percent of society is “gay.”

Almost 98 percent of the 35,557 survey respondents identified themselves as “straight” or “not gay,” according to the survey by the federal National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). It also found significant health and behavior disparities between heterosexuals and self-described gays, lesbians and bisexuals. For example, the latter were much more likely to be heavy drinkers than straights.

So much for ‘10 percent’

The 2.3 percent gay-lesbian-bisexual figure is far below the “10 percent gay” number that has been advanced for decades by homosexual activists and their allies—dating back to the discredited sex research of Alfred Kinsey, who vastly over-sampled sexual adventurers and deviants (including criminals). The “10 Percent” ploy suggested homosexuality was far more common—and hence “normal”–than it actually was. Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, homosexual authors of the influential 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in 90s (and relying on Kinsey’s fraudulent estimates), demonstrate how the myth was used for PR purposes:


If we must…pick a specific percentage for propaganda purposes, we may as well stick with the solidly conservative figure suggested by Kinsey decades ago: taking men and women together, at least 10% of the populace has demonstrated its homosexual proclivities so extensively that the proportion may reasonably be called ‘gay.’….

Straights do not appreciate that, with at least one-tenth of the public extensively involved in it, the practice of homosexuality may be a more commonplace activity in America than, say, bowling (6%), jogging (7%), golfing (5%), hunting (6%), reading drugstore romance novels (9%), or ballroom dancing (2%) on a regular basis. (Ballroom dancing—not that’s abnormal.)…

You should grasp clearly why America’s persistent underestimation of the number of homosexuals in its citizenry and core institutions is so dangerous to the cause of civil rights….Literally, the more the better. As Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin explain dryly in their classic study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male

“To those who believe, as children do, that conformance should be universal, any departure from the rule becomes immorality. The immorality seems particularly gross to an individual who is unaware of the frequency with which exceptions to the supposed rule actually occur.”

Thus, when it comes to fighting the charge that homosexuality is statistically abnormal hence immoral, there is strength in numbers. [pp. 16-17, emphasis theirs]

Here I call it a myth, but the defiance with which homosexual activists like Kirk and Madsen so aggressively promulgated their “10 percent gay” factoid suggests that it could more aptly be called a lie, perhaps a useful political lie—which is to say, propaganda. (Another LGBT activist distortion is the oft-repeated claim that homosexuals, and now transgenders, are “born that way” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.)

For example, Kevin Jennings, the founder of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, and a former Obama Department of Education appointee, titled one of his books, “One Teacher in Ten” (see graphic above)—which is far more compelling, from a “gay” activist perspective, than “One Teacher in 45.”

Of course, it didn’t help the cause of accuracy that “mainstream” media organs like the Washington Post routinely repeated the bogus 10-percent figure in their homosexuality-related articles, as if it were fact. Conservative efforts to correct the powerful “10 percent” myth often fell on deaf media ears.

To this day, some LGBT activists and straight, liberal allies maintain that “10 percent” of the population of the United States, or any society for that matter, is “gay” or bisexual/transgender. Given the new NHIS data, which confirms previous surveys that put the “gay” population at 1-3 percent, and no higher than 5 percent, this claim is as tendentious as it is absurd.

Gay_Population_NHIS_Table-2014
NHIS table on population of those who identify as “gay, lesbian or bisexual.” Unlike homosexuals, most straights did not claim a “sexual identity, “and many answered the question by saying that were “not gay.” Go HERE to read the full NHIS report. Click on graphic to enlarge.

[To read about two other studies confirming low population percentages for homosexuals, see this report on a 2011 Williams Institute survey that found that 1.7 percent of the U.S. adult population is “gay or lesbian”; also see this account by Paul Cameron's group, Family Research Institute, of an older study by the liberal Alan Guttmacher Institute, which "interviewed over 3,300 men throughout the country in 1991, [and]] found that only 2.3 percent of those interviewed admit to a same-sex experience in the last ten years; only 1.1 percent say they have been exclusively gay.”]

NHIS: the Gold Standard of population data

The National Center for Health Statistics is a branch of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the thoroughly-tested methods used for its ongoing “National Health Interview Survey” (NHIS) make it a trusted source of population data. [I will discuss those methods and the challenges of gathering survey information about homosexuality in Part Two of this AFTAH report.] This survey, based on 2013 interviews, was the first NHIS to report on “sexual orientation’ data; it states:

continued at The ?10 Percent Gay? Myth Is Dead ? Just 1.6 Percent of U.S. Adults Identify as Gay or Lesbian, and .7 Percent as Bisexual, Major Federal Survey Finds » Americans for Truth