Homosexuals Less Than 2% of Population Says Report Released Today

[pisces_ken02]

The study is stupid. Most men who are gay will never admit they are... Trust me, the real number would really scare this country.

Also.. what percentage of the population who may have had at least one same sex encounter.. that number would also surprise America

 

[Fallen1984]

I know better from everyday experience, not to mention from countless CREDIBLE sources. And any crackpot, homophobe nutjob (who is obviously not a member of the AMA or the APA) can and will be easily discredited. And disgraced.

 

[slobone]

This 10% figure that so many people seem to believe -- where did it come from? Not from the Kinsey Report, which found closer to 4% who were exclusively gay. That sounds more likely to me. I think there's a lot of wishful thinking here.

In any event, guys, I hope y'all at least understand that "that's bullshit" and "not from my experience" etc. are useless as contributions to scientific knowledge.

We may never have an accurate figure for a lot of good reasons, not the least of which is defining what a homosexual is.

If a guy has gay sex once and straight sex a hundred times, is he gay? how about if 2% of his experiences are same-sex? 3%? Where do you draw the line?

How about if he had only gay sex till he was 30, then got married to a woman and has never cheated on her? Do you still call him a homosexual?

Just to throw this into the mix -- in the 2000 US census, the first to track same-sex couples, no state had even as many as 2% of couples living together that were same-sex. In most states the number was below 1%.

 

[rareboy]

One of the other things that doesn't ring true is their sample size. The science of sampling is so precise that you don't have to poll 121,300 people. There is something seriously amiss with the fundamental idea of someone getting funding to hire enough people to ask questions of that many respondents. I suspect the majority of the gayish people who responded to a totally unscientific study would have told the person calling them or standing at the door that their sexuality was none of anybody's fucking business. I can also guarantee that if there was a legitimate study of this many people in Canada, it would have been in the news big time. I don't believe there was a Canadian Community survey in 2003. It makes me think of the tabloids that always have a story about a 500 lb. two headed baby in the outback of Bolivia or among yurt dwellers in Mongolia.

This sounds like the typical psuedoscience drivel that we have come to expect from the Camerons. I suspect though, that the Reform, oops sorry, the Conservative party in Canada will be able to use this study as a cornerstone in repealing all the gay equality laws once they have purchased their majority government in the next election.

Certainly one thing that I would say has changed over the last decade is that many more younger people seem to put themselves in the bisexual chic camp or the straight curious tent than declaring they are purely gay, because in spite of the tremendous strides made to gain equal rights, there is still a social stigma attached to being gay. The Camerons feed this kind of stigma by using 'science' to isolate and diminish a population in order to further the social agenda of the religious right foundations that fund their work.

The good news...they are biodegradable.

 

[rareboy]

Just a follow up...the Canadian Community Health survey by Statscan covered many areas of Health care service needs. The way it would have been organized would have resulted missing concentrations of gay populations in urban forward sortation areas, so the numbers would be skewed for the country as a whole.

I think this is why Canadians didn't take this study too seriously; it might have been a great way to study obesity and smoking, or whether you needed a doctor, but it was far from representative when it came to gays.

The actual results were:

* (see First Information on Sexual Orientation from StatCan): Among Canadians aged 18 to 59, 1.0% reported that they consider themselves to be homosexual and 0.7% considered themselves bisexual. About 1.3% of men considered themselves homosexual, about twice the proportion of 0.7% among women. However, 0.9% of women reported being bisexual, slightly higher than the proportion of 0.6% among men. The results indicate that, for some health-related measures, there are important differences between the heterosexual population and the gay, lesbian and bisexual population. Among individuals aged 18 to 59, for example, 21.8% of homosexuals and bisexuals reported that they had an unmet health care need in 2003, nearly twice the proportion of heterosexuals (12.7%). Homosexuals and bisexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to find life stressful. In addition, 31.4% of homosexuals and bisexuals reported that they were physically active in 2003, compared with 25.4% of heterosexuals.


DATA ACCESS: www.statcan.ca/english/concepts/health/


Just one other note ....If Statscan can report their flawed data as an absolute, I guess anyone can....and I'm not sure that a person in power using intimidation to respond to perceived intimidation really contributes to a positive result.