When I was in Primary school our teacher told us not to use the word “gay” as an insult. “One in ten people,” he explained, “are gay.” This was enough to excite the class of twenty, and we all started turning around in our chairs as if, somehow, by pretending to identify the two gays in the room we’d be excluding ourselves from possibly being part of the LGBT community. “Is it you?” asked someone opposite to me, as if “it” was some clandestine double agent planted around us. I laughed. “No!” small me said. What? Me? How could I be…Besides, one in ten was pretty low odds. Well, little primary school me was pretty wrong, but what intrigues me the most about that experience is the bit about one in ten people being gay. Where were these numbers coming from? Did “gay” mean the whole LGBTQ alphabet soup? Or just straight-up homosexuals?
Recently, I was watching Adam Rippon (the gay icon of 2018) being interviewed by Ellen (the gay icon of forever). “One in five children identify as LGBTQ,” he said. 'Yaaas,' I thought. And then - What?
In six years, apparently, the number of queer kids had doubled…Well, there are a number of factors that need to be considered. Generally, in countries like Australia, the rate of LGBT+ identities is higher the younger you go. This makes sense, seeing as LGBT+ acceptance is increasing, awareness is spreading, and hate and discrimination are gradually — if reluctantly — on a trajectory towards oblivion.
Second, surveys can be notoriously unreliable. People are more likely to say they identify as straight, even if they have felt same sex attraction, because of the stigma, discrimination and fear directed at the LGBT+ community. It seems likely that surveys might underrepresent the number of queer people in a sample. With this in mind, I decided to have a look at the studies.
My first stop was to try and find out the origins of the 10% claim. Turns out a few people have already tried this. Most attribute it to Alfred Kinsey, the infamous originator of that “Kinsey scale”, which says total heterosexuality is 0, total gayness is 6, and everyone falls somewhere along this line. Kinsey conducted a number of groundbreaking studies in the 1940s, at the conclusion of which he proclaimed at least 37% of men had some homosexual experiences, and 17% of males scored from 4-6 on his scale. His survey on women suggested different results for different age groups, so Kinsey pulled out some weird maths and the overall average for the entire population came out at…10%.
Let’s be clear, though: Kinsey was a dodgy scientist, if you can even call him that, and statistics was…really not his thing. But an investigation by David Spiegelhalter suggests that the 10% guess might not be too far off. A recent survey by Gallup suggested that out of 1.6 million Americans, 4% identified as LGBTQ. The clincher is that millennials born between 1980 and 1998 returned a record high of 7.3%: this was a massive 5.8% increase from their previous results in 2012.
In the space of five years, did millions of Americans suddenly become queer thanks to Nazi brainwashing?
Unlikely. What it shows is that after five years, more people now feel comfortable responding truthfully about their identity. Five years from now, who knows how many more people will say answer the survey as LGBT+. The most interesting part about this survey is what is driving the increase. Yes, more young people are more willing to disclose their LGBT identity. But another big driver is the increasing rate of bisexual women who are identifying themselves in the survey. A recent study by Australia’s Roy Morgan Research suggests that 6.5% of people in their 20s identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual.
Roy Morgan’s CEO Michele Levine sums up most surveys like theirs pretty well: "Finding out the 'real' number, therefore, is less about getting a head-count and more a gauge of just how open we are.”
Maybe the labels are the problem.
YouGov is a pretty formidable research company, and they have some more progressive stats. Asked to plot themselves on the Kinsey scale, 23% of British respondents chose something other than fully straight (from 5 to 1). And for 18-24 year olds — it was 54%! 46% of people identified themselves as totally straight, 6% as totally gay, and 43% as somewhere in between.
So people are open to admitting same sex attraction — but it didn’t stop there. Respondents were asked if they would be willingly to have a same sex relationship, if the person was 'right.' People who labelled themselves as a 1 on the scale were 35% more likely to say yes than people on a 0.
The most tempting conclusion is that none of this really matters. So what if people have gay feelings but say they’re straight on surveys, right? Power to them. Who cares if it’s 1 in 10, or 1 in 5? The truth is though, it does matter, because people who do feel brave enough to come out as LGBT face discrimination, hatred and harassment. Most people who don’t disclose their same sex attraction or gender diversity aren’t doing it by choice, they do it because they feel ashamed, or afraid. We have to keep advocating, protesting, and being as visible as we can. Only then will people feel comfortable and safe enough that the surveys reflect the truth.