Prevalence of homosexuality
The factual accuracy of the final paragraph and the presentation of statistical summaries is disputed.
Estimates of the prevalence of homosexuality vary considerably with the definition of what "homosexuality" actually is. Some consider its most important aspect to be sexual behavior between members of the same sex ("homosexual acts"), while others stress inclination or orientation. Three primary definitions are same-sex sexual activity, same-sex sexual inclination, and same-sex sexual identity. These may be further divided.
For example, same-sex sexual behavior may occur among people who do not identify themselves as "homosexual" (see gay sex and MSM). This is common in macho cultures which distinguish between the "active" and the "passive" sexual partner, where the "active" partner does not usually consider himself to be homosexual.
Conversely, persons who identify as same-sex loving are not always sexually active, whether due to necessity, circumstances, or personal choice. Similarly, a person may have same-sex sexual thoughts or inclinations without ever acting on them or regarding themselves as having a same-sex sexual orientation. All of these might fall under the umbrella of "homosexuality", and may or may not be included in research surveys. A survey that counts only same-sex sexual contact, for example, will exclude all celibate homosexuals.
Another significant distinction can be made between what medical statisticians call incidence and prevalence. For example, even if two studies agree on a common criterion for considering someone to be homosexual, one study might regard this as applying to any person who has ever met this criterion, whereas another might only regard them as being so if they had done so during the year of the survey.
As a result of these fundamental problems, the results and conclusions of studies on homosexuality are invariably challenged. Indeed, unclear definitions, social stigmas, and political influences make it essentially impossible to accurately determine the number of "homosexuals" in a given society. In general, most research agrees that the number of people who have had multiple same-gender sexual experiences is fewer than the number of people who have had a single such experience, and that the number of people who identify themselves as exclusively homosexual is fewer than the number of people who have had multiple homosexual experiences.
At one extreme, the Kinsey report (1948) reported that 37% of men in the U.S. had achieved orgasm through contact with another male after adolescence. However, Kinsey's work was based on a population sample that was likely to have been biased and consequently his results have been disputed. Since Kinsey, a number of large-scale cross-cultural studies, involving tens of thousands of subjects selected at random, have consistently reported a percentage lower than Kinsey's estimate. For example,
- Smith's 1991 analysis of University of Chicago reported that 2.8 percent of men and 1.4 percent of women identified as gay or bisexual in a 1994 study.
In general, surveys quoted by anti-gay activists tend to show figures nearer 1%, while surveys quoted by gay activists tend to show figures nearer 10%, with a mean of 4-5% figure most often cited in mainstream media reports.
It is important to note, however, that these numbers are subject to many of the pitfalls inherent in researching sensitive social issues. It is possible that survey results may be biased by under-reporting, for instance. (See note 1.) The frequent use of non-random samples (white college students) in many studies could also serve to skew the data.
In addition, major historical shifts can occur in the prevalence of homosexuality. For example, the Hamburg Institute for Sexual Research conducted a survey over the sexual behavior of young people in 1970, and repeated it in 1990. Whereas in 1970 18% of the boys reported to have made same-sex sexual experiences, the number had dropped to 2% by 1990. "Since homosexuality is publicly negotiated as a sexual form in its own, the fear of the boys is added to be looked at as a queer," the director of the institute, Volkmar Sigusch, suggested in a 1998 article for a German medical journal.
See also
Footnote
[1]: Survey responses are often conditioned by the desire not to express opinions or supply information of which the respondent suspects society or the questioner may not approve. Revealing one's sexual orientation may well fall into this category, so affecting the accuracy of some surveys and under-estimating the actual scale of homosexuality. A similar phenomenon affects survey data on minority religions, on personal views on controversial matters such as abortion, and on degrees of political support for a political party. (Classic examples of this are not 'admitting' support in surveys in the late 1990s for the British Conservative Party, or controversial parties like the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, etc. with such parties getting a higher vote in the privacy of a ballot box than reported in surveys.) The NORC data has been criticised because the original design sampling techniques were not followed, and depended upon direct self report regarding masturbation and same sex behaviors. (For example, the original data in the early 1990s reported that approximately 40% of adult males had never masturbated--a finding inconsistent with some other studies.)
