Story: A coalition of leading pro-homosexual activist groups has now admitted in a legal brief that only "2.8 percent of the male, and 1.4% of the female, population identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual."

The admission is in stark contrast to the popular myth that ten percent of the population is homosexual.

The acknowledgement that the actual size of the homosexual or bisexual population is far smaller came in an amices curiae (or 'friend of the court') brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Lawrence v. Texas. In the case, homosexual activists are seeking to have a Texas law barring homosexual sodomy declared unconstitutional. The brief was filed on behalf of a coalition of 31 pro-homosexual activist groups, including some of the leading national organizations like the Human Rights Campaign; the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force; Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG); the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD); and the People for the American Way Foundation.

The unusually candid statement about the relatively low number of homosexuals in the population appeared on page 16 of the brief. The text contains the assertion, "There are approximately six million openly gay men and women in the United States, and 450,000 gay men and lesbians in Texas." After the national figure there appears a footnote, number 42 in the brief. The actual footnote at the bottom of the page reads as follows (in its entirety):

The most widely accepted study of sexual practices in the United States is the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS). The NHSLS found that 2.8% of the male, and 1.4% of the female, population identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. See Laumann, et al., The Social Organization of Sex: Sexual Practices in the United States (1994). This amounts to nearly 4 million openly gay men and 2 million women who identify as lesbian.

Unfortunately, despite their candor about the small percentage of the population that is homosexual, the authors of the brief still managed to overestimate the actual number of "openly gay men and women" by more than a third. That's because the figures of "4 million openly gay men and 2 million women who identify as lesbian" were apparently arrived at by multiplying the 2.8% and 1.4% figures by the total number of males and females in the U.S. population. Yet it hardly seems reasonable to count any of the 60 million Americans who are fourteen years old or younger (and particularly the 40 million who are nine or younger) as "openly gay men and women."

If one applies the percentage figures from the NHSLS instead to only the population of men and women 18 years old or more, one arrives at an estimate that perhaps 4.3 million Americans (2.8 million men and 1.5 million women) identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual. The percentage of the population that identifies exclusively as homosexual (not bisexual) is only 2.0 percent for men and 0.9 percent for women, or about 2 million men and slightly less than a million women. And the NHSLS found that only 0.9 percent of men and 0.4 percent of women reported having only same-sex sexual partners since age 18, a figure that would represent a total of only about 1.4 million Americans (men and women combined).

The book on the NHSLS that was cited in the homosexual groups' brief refers as well to "the myth of 10 percent." It also mentions in a footnote that "Bruce Voeller (1990) claims to have originated the 10 percent estimate as part of the modern gay rights movement's campaign in the late 1970s to convince politicians and the public that 'We [gays and lesbians] Are Everywhere.'" At the time, Voeller was the chair of the National Gay Task Force--forerunner to one of the groups represented by the recent brief.-PSS

http://www.frc.org/get/n03d012.cfm