Homostudies Five: the American Paradigm
Alfred C. Kinsey created the first American Paradigm of the study of (homo)sexuality. This model was both positivist and behaviorist. It was positivist in emphasizing the collection of masses of empirical data. It was behaviorist (or anti-idealist) in the assumption that conduct and experience trump conceptualization.
Moreover, Kinsey insisted that the terms heterosexual and homosexual could be used only as adjectives, and not as nouns. In blurring the line between opposite-sex and same-sex behavior, Kinsey tended to downplay the special qualities of the latter.
EARLIER AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS
Prior to World War II the US contribution to sex research was relatively modest. There are several reasons for this paucity. During the latter part of the nineteenth century American physicians were seeking to enhance their status, so as to bring their profession up to level achieved by their European colleagues. Accomplishing task required, they believed, the perception that they were reinforcing established social norms--of “respectability” in short. In addition, there was the reticence regarding sexual matters that we inherited from the mother country Great Britain. Under the leadership of Anthony Comstock, moral entrepreneurs were particularly vigilant in detecting and suppressing any publications they deemed obscene. While physicians sought to insulate themselves from this suppression by limiting their audience to other professionals where “sensitive” subjects, such as sexuality were concerned, caution seemed warranted.
There were some exceptions to this professional silence. Among them is a contribution by Edward J. Kempf (1885-1971), a physician influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. In his book “Psychopathology” (1920) he posited a condition known as homosexual panic. In the early years it was sometimes known as Kempf's Disease. In the moralizing language of the period, he defined it as "panic due to the pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings," ascribing its importance to the frequency with which it occurred whenever men or women had to be grouped apart from the opposite sex "for prolonged periods, as in army camps, aboard ships, on exploring expeditions, in prisons, monasteries, schools and asylums."
According to Kempf, when released in this way homosexual longings threaten to overcome the individual's ego, his sense of self-control, which has been weakened by fatigue, debilitating fevers, loss of love object, misfortunes, homesickness, the seductive pressure of some superior, or erotic companions. These unfortunate homosexual desires cause delusions about situations, objects, and persons that tend to gratify the craving, or even hallucinations of them. When the erotic hallucination is felt to be an external reality and the subject can find no defense, panic ensues. The erotic affect may manifest itself as visions, voices, electric injections, "drugged" feelings, "poison" and "filth" in the food, seductive and hypnotic influences, irresistible trance states, crucifixion, and the like. The panic state may be more or less severe, lasting from a few hours to several months, and the metabolic disturbances attending such dissociations of the personality, because the autonomic reactions produced by fear may be quite serious.
As Warren Johansson has pointed out, “[i]t is significant that the concept of homosexual panic emerged in the United States just after World War I, when for the first time since 1865 large numbers of men were brought together in training camps and military bases with no members of the opposite sex present (Johansson in Dynes et al. 1990).
While Kempf’s concept has been largely discarded, it is still sometimes invoked as a legal defense--the “gay panic defense.” In such situations, the perpetrator of a homophobic attack is alleged to have lost control because of the overwhelming pressure of the panic he experiences. However, the validity of this approach is usually subject to challenge in the court room.
There were also some instances of anticipation of Kinsey’s method of using case histories. A remarkable instance is due to Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher (1863-1940), who taught in Stanford University’s hygiene department. Mosher created what may well rank the first American sex survey. She started it in 1892 as a 28-year-old biology undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin; she had been asked to address a local Mother's Club on "the marital relation" and as a single, childless woman seems to have turned to data collection to fill gaps in her knowledge. Afterward, Mosher continued conducting surveys until 1920, using variations on the same form and amassing 45 profiles in all.
The Mosher Survey recorded not only women's sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children, and contraception. Some of the women spoke with surprising frankness. One, born in 1844, called sex "a normal desire" and observed that "a rational use of it tends to keep people healthier." Offered another, born in 1862, "[t]he highest devotion is based upon it, a very beautiful thing, and I am glad nature gave it to us.”
A kind of closet sexologist, Dr. Mosher deemed it unwise to publish her results; they remained unknown until the historian Carl Degler rediscovered them in the 1970s.
Another pioneering researcher was Robert Latou Dickinson (1861-1950), an obstetrician and gynecologist who conducted studies concerning female sexuality between 1890 and 1920. Gradually he assembled data from 5200 case histories. In some instances he was able to follow the subjects through several periods of their lives, showing changes in behavior. A trained artist, Dickinson also made sketches of genitalia and sexual intercourse. Most of his findings were only published late in life.
KINSEY
We turn now to the central figure in this first American paradigm. Alfred Charles Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, in Hoboken, New Jersey where his father was a professor at Stephens Institute of Technology. His formative years were both promising and unpromising. For most of his childhood Kinsey's parents were poor, and the boy often went without proper medical care. His bout with rickets caused curvature of the spine, resulting in a slight stoop. Kinsey's parents were strict Methodists; his extremely devout father imposed strict rules on the household including mandating Sunday as a day of prayer. While Kinsey became a religious skeptic in later life, the single-mindedness and discipline inherent in his father’s approach left an enduring impress.
The young Kinsey showed great interest in nature and camping, which he did in conjunction with the YMCA and the Boy Scouts. Even though a childhood disease had weakened his heart, Kinsey practiced an intense regime of difficult hikes and camping expeditions throughout his early life. In this he may have been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by Theodore Roosevelt, who similarly struggled overcome handicaps by practicing the “strenuous life.”
In high school Kinsey was a hard-working student with little interest in sports. At one time, he aspired to become a concert pianist, but decided to concentrate on his scientific pursuits instead, where he was drawn to biology, botany, and zoology. After two unhappy years at Stevens Institute of Technology, in the fall of 1914 he transferred to Bowdon College in Maine, where he could focus on biology, in particularly on insect research. He continued his graduate studies at Harvard University’s Bussey Institute, where he worked under the eminent entomologist William Morton Wheeler. Kinsey chose to produce his doctoral thesis on gall wasps, collecting samples of the species with zeal. After receiving his Harvard Sc.D. degree, he published several papers in 1920 under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, essentially introducing the gall wasp to the scientific community. Of the more than 18 million insects in the museum's collection, an astounding 5 million are gall wasps collected by Kinsey.
Having joined the faculty of Indiana University, Kinsey married Clara Bracken McMillen, known as “Mac,” in 1921. They had four children, of whom one died in childhood. Kinsey wrote a widely used high-school textbook, An Introduction to Biology (1926), basically supporting the principles of Darwininian Evolution. Kinsey also co-wrote a classic book entitled Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America (1943) with Merritt Lyndon Fernald. He continued his research on gall wasps.
With this background, Kinsey’s turn to the systematic study of human sexuality seemed somewhat surprising. About 1933, however, he became interested in the different forms of sexual practices, after discussing the topic extensively with a colleague, Robert Kroc. In 1935, Kinsey delivered a lecture to a faculty discussion group at Indiana University, wherein he attacked the "widespread ignorance of sexual structure and physiology" and promoted his view that "delayed marriage" (that is, delayed sexual experience) was psychologically harmful.
In due course Kinsey obtained research funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to conduct sustained field work documenting into human sexual behavior in America. Published in an austere scientific form by a a medical publisher, his two Kinsey Reports—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female—reached the top of bestseller lists and turned the Indiana University professor into an instant celebrity. Articles about him appeared in popular magazines such as Time, Life, Look and McCall’s. The storm of controversy stirred up by Kinsey's reports was a major contributor to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. While this turbulence served to convey much useful information in a formerly taboo subject, it made the continuation of his work more difficult. Indiana University's president Herman B. Wells staunchly defended Kinsey's research in what became a well-known test of academic freedom.
KINSEY'S REPORTS
The key feature of his classification of sexual orientation is that in the Reports Kinsey rejected the simple dichotomy of heterosexual vs. homosexual, preferring to use a seven-point scale instead. The Kinsey scale attempts to describe a person's sexual history or episodes of their sexual activity at a given time. It goes from 0, meaning exclusively heterosexual to 6, meaning exclusively homosexual. There are thus five categories that can be loosely termed bisexual, though Kinsey avoided this term. Standing apart from the main points of the scale was an additional grade, noted as “X,” which was used for asexuality.
Kinsey explained his reasoning as follows. “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.
“While emphasizing the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history [...] An individual may be assigned a position on this scale, for each period in his life. [...] A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist." [Kinsey, et al. (1948). pp. 639, 656].
The main scale is as follows:
0 -- Exclusively heterosexual
1 -- Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2 -- Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 -- Equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 -- Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 -- Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6 -- Exclusively homosexual
In his article on “Incidence” in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (1990), C.A. Tripp concisely summed up Kinsey’s conclusions regarding sexual orientation.
“[The] scale not only takes into account differences in the balance between heterosexual and homosexual actions, but also allows an investigator to consider "psychologic reactions" in arriving at each rating. Thus two people might both be rated "6"-for being exclusively homosexual, with one of them living out his or her experiences, while the other might have as little as no overt activity of this kind - for reasons ranging from moral inhibitions to simply a lack of opportunity. Ordinarily, it is easy to arrive at a single rating for a person's mental and physical responses. But whenever the two are in sharp discord (such as when a man has most or all of his sexual activity with women, but requires homosexual fantasies to actually reach orgasm), there is much to criticize in the compromises implicit in the 0-6 Scale. (To such complaints Kinsey simply pointed out that while rating difficulties and imperfections are, indeed, apparent in some cases, it is nevertheless useful, the best rating device so far, and that more is gained by using than by ignoring it.) The combination of applying these measures of incidence, of frequency, and of placement on the 0-6 Scale (tabulated yearly or for a lifetime) not only permitted the Kinsey Research to cast out oversimplified stereotypes long used in defining heterosexual and homosexual variations, but to off er a variety of samples of its white male population, among them that: 58 percent of the males who belong to the group that goes into high school but not beyond, 59 percent of the grade school level, and 47 percent of the college level have had homosexual experience to the point of orgasm if they remain single to the age of 35. 13 percent of males react erotically to other males without having overt homosexual contacts after the onset of adolescence. [This 13 percent, coupled with the 37 percent who do have overt homosexual experience, means that a full 50 percent of males have at least some sexual response to other males after adolescence - and conversely, that only the other 50 percent of the male population is entirely heterosexual throughout life.) 25 percent of the male population has more than incidental homosexual experience or reactions [i.e., rates 2-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 18 percent of males have at least as much homosexual as heterosexual experience in their histories (i.e., rate 3-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 13 percent of the male population has more homosexual than heterosexual experience (i.e., rates 4 - 6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 8 percent of males are exclusively homosexual (i.e., rate 6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 4 percent of males are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives after the onset of adolescence. (Kinsey, 1948, pp. 650-51)”
Kinsey held that the words heterosexual and homosexual should never be used as nouns but only as adjectives, representing behaviors, rather than persons. This preference accords with the Anglo-Saxon inclination to empiricism and nominalism. The sheer number of interviews is impressive: 5300 for the male volume, 6000 for the female one. While Kinsey took pains to acquaint himself with the more theoretically inclined European sex research, he chose his own approach, in part out of personal preference but also because of a sense that such sober factuality, backed up as it was by massive data, would be more acceptable to the American public, which was in those days generally reticent about discussion of sex in a serious (that is, nonsensationalist) fashion,
Those who have concluded that some 10% of the American population is predominantly homosexual rely on their interpretation of the tables in the Reports. However, various conclusions can be drawn from the data, and (as noted above) Kinsey disapproved of using terms like homosexual or heterosexual to describe individuals, maintaining that sexuality is prone to change over time, and that sexual behavior can be understood both as physical contact as well as purely psychological phenomena (desire, sexual attraction, fantasy). After reading the first Kinsey volume, Harry Hay, the founder of the American gay movement, concluded that Kinsey’s data showed that homosexual were a separate people. Kinsey would have completely rejected this interpretation.
CRITICS OF KINSEY'S FINDINGS
Early on, academic criticisms appeared concerning sample selection and sample bias in the research underlying the Reports. Two main problems cited were that significant portions of the samples come from prison populations and male prostitutes, and that people who volunteer to be interviewed about a taboo subject are likely to suffer from the problem of self-selection. If these criticisms could be substantiated, they would undermine the usefulness of the sample in terms of determining the tendencies of the overall population.
Critics zeroed in on what they regarded the over-representation of some groups in the sample: in the subjects used for the male volume, 25% were, or had been, 5% inmates, and 5% were male prostitutes. In response, Paul Gebhard Kinsey's successor as director of the Indiana University Institute, produced a new statistical analysis, ostensibly cleansing the Kinsey data of purported contaminants, removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in the basic sample. In 1979, Gebhard (with Alan B. Johnston) published The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938–1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research. The authors concluded that none of Kinsey's original estimates were significantly affected by this bias: that is, prison population, male prostitutes, and those who willingly participated in discussion of previously taboo sexual topics had the same statistical tendency as the general population. However, Kinsey had a particular fascination with individuals that we would now call gay, and probably over-represented these in his general samples, accounting for the apparent concordance between the prison/prostitute group and the general sample.
After Kinsey’s death information came to light that in his later years Kinsey’s personal orientation had became more and more homosexual. For many years this information was suppressed by Kinsey’s associates, suggesting that they believed that it might tend to discredit his results concerning the frequency of homosexual behavior. At this late date it is probably impossible to determine the truth of this controversy. Suffice it to say that Kinsey’s data for homosexual behavior in American white males (blacks were not included in the study) indicated that this conduct was considerably higher than anyone had considered heretofore. In particular, Kinsey showed that many individuals who would have regarded themselves (and been regarded) as totally straight were capable of fairly extensive same-sex conduct.
IMITATORS
The Kinsey Reports sparked a host of imitators in the United States and abroad. Several studies, produced by associates and followers of Kinsey were intended as followups. One such is Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity among Men and Women (1978), This ambitious study examines the various ways individuals have made social and psychological adjustments to their homosexuality. The monograph is based on interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay area with 1500 individuals (including black men and women, groups omitted from the two Kinsey studies) in a project supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. The book has attracted criticism on several grounds: (1) the limitation to San Francisco makes extrapolation to the rest of North America problematic; (2) interviewing standards are unclear; (3) the proposed typology of specific kinds of partnerships or lifestyles— close-coupled, open-coupled, functional, dysfunctional, and asexual—is of uncertain value.
This work had its own sequel, Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith, Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women (1981). Reviewing the existing literature, the authors conclude that there is no significant correlation between early family experience and adult sexual preference and therefore that sexual preference must be controlled essentially by biological-constitutional factors. Although further evidence has appeared subsequently, this conclusion remains controversial in some quarters.
In 1990 the Kinsey Institute published "Homosexuality/Heterosexuality: Concepts of Sexual Orientation," edited by David McWhirter and others. The authors found that 13.95% of males and 4.25% of females having had either "extensive" or "more than incidental" homosexual experience.
For a time, a male-female team of researchers, William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, vied for prestige with Alfred Kinsey and his associates. Working at their own institution, the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation, St. Louis, they produced Human Sexual Response in 1966. They supplemented Kinsey by producing more detailed accounts of the physiology of the sexual act. This volume (no longer much read) contains little on homosexuality, for which see their Homosexuality in Perspective (1979).
Because the controversy made funding harder to find, some resorted to the so-called “convenience method,” in which samples would left in various public places for those who wished to to respond. Naturally, these exhibit volunteer bias, and must be judged accordingly. Among these contributions is Sherry Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality (1978). This book purports to summarize the responses of 3000 American women to a questionnaire concerning their own sexuality. This book launched the fashion for a series of pop avatars of Kinsey. As samples they are almost worthless, but they reveal much of changing fashions--in this instance Hite's own feminist concepts of sexuality. The author also produced The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (1981).New York: Knopf, 1981; 1129 pp.). Similar efforts were produced for gays and lesbians by Karla Jay and Allen Young (1979) and by James Spada (1979).
For some years serious research languished, though there was some effort to replicate the Kinsey results in Western European countries. Then in 1994 a team headed by Edward O. Laumann of the University of Chicago produced their “The Social Organization of Sexuality.” This book reports on the findings of the National Health and Social Life Survey, a 1992 nationwide study of 3432 American men and women between the ages of 18 and 59. Beginning with the theoretical foundations, rationale for, and design of the methodology, the authors put the work in historical context, urging caution about interpretation and implications of their sometimes surprising findings. Though the study was designed largely to "fill significant gaps in our knowledge of sexual behavior associated with the acquisition of the AIDS virus," this study attempted a reexamination of masturbation, sexually transmitted infections, cohabitation and marriage, fertility, and homosexuality. A significant portion of the National Health and Life study was geared towards homosexuality. The results found that 8.6% of women and 10.1% of men had at one point in their life experienced some form of homosexuality. Of these, 87% of women and 76% of men reported current same-sex attraction. 41% of women and 52% of men had sex with someone of the same gender, and 16% of women and 27% of men identified as GLBT.
In 2010 findings from the National Survey of Health and Behavior (NSSHB) study were reported. Indiana University sex researchers interviewed nearly 6,000 people nationwide between the ages of 14 and 94. The NSSHB results indicated enormous variability in the sexual repertoires of U.S. adults, with more than 40 combinations of sexual activity described at adults’ most recent sexual event. The researchers found that 7 percent of women and 8 percent of men identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual. By age 50, 15% of men have had at least one oral sex encounter with another man.
INTERNATIONAL COUNTERPARTS
The closing years of the twentieth century saw an upsurge of studies of sexual behavior in various nations, with particular emphasis on sexual orientation. For most, however, the usual caveats regarding sampling and volunteerism apply.
In 2001-02 the largest and most thorough survey in Australia to date was conducted by telephone interview with 19,307 respondents between the ages of 16 and 59. The study found that 97.4% of men identified as heterosexual, 1.6% as gay and 0.9% as bisexual. For women 97.7% identified as heterosexual, 0.8% as lesbian and 1.4% as bisexual. However, 8.6% of men and 15.1% of women reported either feelings of attraction to the same gender or some sexual experience with the same gender. Half the men and two-thirds of the women who had same-sex sexual experience regarded themselves as heterosexual rather than homosexual.
A 2003 survey of 135,000 Canadians found that 1.0% of the respondents identified themselves as homosexual, while 0.7% identified themselves as bisexual. About 1.3% of men considered themselves homosexual, almost 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. In the 18-35 age bracket, 2.0% considered themselves to be either homosexual or bisexual, but the number decreased to 1.9% among 35–44 year olds, and further still to 1.2% in the population aged 45–59. Quebec and British Columbia had higher percentages than the national average -- 2.3% and 1.9%, respectively.
In France, a 1992 study of 20,055 people found that 4.1% of the men and 12.6% of the women had at least one occurrence of intercourse with person of the same sex during their lifetime.
In a 1988 random survey of 6,300 Norwegians, 3.5% of the men and 3% of the women reported that they had a homosexual experience sometime in their life. Also in that country, according to the Durex Global Sex Survey for 2003, 12% of Norwegian respondents have had homosexual sex.
In the United Kingdom a 1992 study of 8,337 British men found that 6.1% have had a homosexual experience." and 3.6% had "1+ homosexual partner ever." In 2005 the HM Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry completed a survey to help the Government analyze the financial implications of the Civil Partnerships Act (such as pensions, inheritance and tax benefits). They concluded that there were 3.6 million gay people in the United Kingdom – around 6% of the total population or 1 in 16.66 people. Finally, in 2010 a representative survey of 238,206 Britons found 1% were gay or lesbian and .5% were bisexual. A further 0.5% self-identified as "other," and 3% responded as "do not know" or refused to answer.
UPDATE (April 19, 2011)
A recent study produced under the auspices of the Williams Institute has generated considerable discussion and controversy. The following summary stems from several news sources. Note that the study emphasized identification. Not included, presumably would be most members of the mostly African American DL group who have same-sex relations but do not classify themselves as gay. Overall, the results suggest greater fluidity of orientation than some gay advocacy groups have been prepared to grant. Here is the summary:
An estimated 9 million Americans -- or nearly 4 percent of the total population -- say they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to a new report released this week from the Williams Institute, a think-tank devoted to LGBT research at UCLA.
Bisexuals make up slightly more than half that group, 1.8 percent of the total U.S. population, and they are substantially more likely to be women than men.
Ostensibly, the report is the most up-to-date assessment of that population. Not unlike most of the other studies noted in above account, it produced a lower population percentage than the 10 percent number that advocacy groups have used in the past, deriving from their interpretation of the 1948 Kinsey Report.
The new data come on the heels of another recent report published by the Institute of Medicine for the National Institutes of Health emphasizing the need for more federally funded research on LGBT health problems.
"Sexual orientation is complex, but measurable," said Gary J. Gates, chief researcher and a Williams Distinguished Scholar. "Hopefully, this will begin to prompt some dialogue on what it."
Other key findings were that an estimated 19 million Americans, or 8.2 percent of the population, said they have engaged in same-sex behavior, and 25.6 million, or 11 percent, acknowledged some same-sex attraction.
While there has been skepticism in some quarters, some gay advocacy groups are hailing the report as a critical first step to inform public policy, research and federal funding. They maintain that the information is crucial in identifying health and economic disparities, discrimination, domestic partnership benefits. and the impact of same-sex marriage.
The report was based on a collection of previous surveys in the United States and around the world.
"All were surveys based on population and we tried to take precautions to minimize biases," said Gates. "Many people still have the 10 percent number in their head," he said of Kinsey, who published his studies in sexual behavior at Indiana University in the 1940s and 1950s.
"Kinsey didn't use a population-based sample, so regardless of the point-estimate, it came from a self-selected group of men," said Gates. "For example, prisoners represented a higher proportion of men in his sample than they would in the population, perhaps biasing the sample toward more same-sex sexual behavior."
Gates said the lower number did not surprise researchers, but it might be new to the general population.
According to Gates, gay advocates adopted the 10 percent number in the late 1960s and 1970s.
"That 10 percent emerges as much a decision of politics as a decision of science, which is not to say Kinsey was not a scholar and scientist," he noted.
But, he added, it was "kind of a smart number -- big enough to kind of matter and not so large that it was threatening to a population that was uncomfortable with it.
"You can argue it was a brilliant strategy and it seemed to resonate with people," he said. "One of the things the study shows, perhaps, is a little bit of maturity of the movement. We can now use more traditional ways to assess the population."
The 3.5 percent of those who identify as LGB may or may not include those who are "closeted," according to Gates. "We actually did commission data within the survey and asked about to what degree they were closeted," Gates said, "and 13 percent who identified as LGB had never told anyone about it."
The most striking results were the data on bisexuals, which made up about half of the overall LGB population. Of those who identified as such, 25 percent said they were closeted.
"Many are still quite discreet about their sexual orientation," Gates said. "If you ask people in the bisexual population, they will tell you it's a different kind of a stigma they experience. Some don't feel completely at home in the LG community because they often think of them as being way too gay and hold them with a level of suspicion. And in general, they are subject to the general stigma of same-sex behavior."
Gates also cautioned against the results that 11 percent of all Americans had same-sex attractions.
"That was only from one survey and it was restricted to 18- to 44-year-olds," he said.
Respondents had to rate their attraction from exclusive opposite-sex attraction (5) in graduating degrees of same-sex feelings (4 to 1).
"Some in category 4 may be people like me who avoid 1s and 5s in surveys," Gates said.
The U.S. Census does not count how many Americans identify as LGBT, although later this year it will release its count of same-sex spouses.
REFERENCES
"AIDS and Sexual Behaviour in France: ACSF Investigators," Nature 360 (6403), 407–9. (December 1992).
Bell, Alan P., and Martin S. Weinberg. Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity among Men and Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
Bell, Alan P., Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith. Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981 (with additional volume, Statistical Appendix, 1981).
Black, Dan, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor. "Demographics of the Gay and Lesbian Population in the United States: Evidence from Available Systematic Data Sources," Demography 37 (2), 139–154 (2002).
Dynes, Wayne R., et al. eds. The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1990.
Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Gebhard, Paul, and Alan B. Johnson. The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938-1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute of Sex Research. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1979.
Gebhard, Paul et al. Sex Offenders. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
Hite, Sherry. The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1976.
----. The Hite Report on Male Sexuality. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Jay, Karla, and Allen Young. The Gay Report. New York: Summit Books,
Jones, James H. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Kinsey, Alfred C. Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul Gebhard. Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953.
Kinsey, Alfred C. Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948.
Masters, William H., and Virginia Johnson. Homosexuality in Perspective. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
----. Human Sexual Response, Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.
McWhirter, David P., Stephanie A. Saunders, and June Machover Reinisch. Homosexuality/Heterosexuality: Concepts of Sexual Orientation. (The Kinsey Institute Series), New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Sex in Australia: The Australian Study of Health and Relationships, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society [2002]. (Published as the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, vol. 27, no 2.)
Simon, Pierre (with Claude Lévy). Rapport sur le comportement sexuel des Français. Paris: Julliard, 1972.
Spada, James, The Spada Report: The Newest Survey of Gay Male Sexuality. New York: New American Library, 1979.
Sundet, J.M., et al. Prevalence of Risk-prone Sexual Behaviour in the General Population of Norway. In: Global Impact of AIDS, edited by Alan F. Fleming et al. New York: Alan R. Liss, 1988, 53–60.
Moreover, Kinsey insisted that the terms heterosexual and homosexual could be used only as adjectives, and not as nouns. In blurring the line between opposite-sex and same-sex behavior, Kinsey tended to downplay the special qualities of the latter.
EARLIER AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS
Prior to World War II the US contribution to sex research was relatively modest. There are several reasons for this paucity. During the latter part of the nineteenth century American physicians were seeking to enhance their status, so as to bring their profession up to level achieved by their European colleagues. Accomplishing task required, they believed, the perception that they were reinforcing established social norms--of “respectability” in short. In addition, there was the reticence regarding sexual matters that we inherited from the mother country Great Britain. Under the leadership of Anthony Comstock, moral entrepreneurs were particularly vigilant in detecting and suppressing any publications they deemed obscene. While physicians sought to insulate themselves from this suppression by limiting their audience to other professionals where “sensitive” subjects, such as sexuality were concerned, caution seemed warranted.
There were some exceptions to this professional silence. Among them is a contribution by Edward J. Kempf (1885-1971), a physician influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. In his book “Psychopathology” (1920) he posited a condition known as homosexual panic. In the early years it was sometimes known as Kempf's Disease. In the moralizing language of the period, he defined it as "panic due to the pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings," ascribing its importance to the frequency with which it occurred whenever men or women had to be grouped apart from the opposite sex "for prolonged periods, as in army camps, aboard ships, on exploring expeditions, in prisons, monasteries, schools and asylums."
According to Kempf, when released in this way homosexual longings threaten to overcome the individual's ego, his sense of self-control, which has been weakened by fatigue, debilitating fevers, loss of love object, misfortunes, homesickness, the seductive pressure of some superior, or erotic companions. These unfortunate homosexual desires cause delusions about situations, objects, and persons that tend to gratify the craving, or even hallucinations of them. When the erotic hallucination is felt to be an external reality and the subject can find no defense, panic ensues. The erotic affect may manifest itself as visions, voices, electric injections, "drugged" feelings, "poison" and "filth" in the food, seductive and hypnotic influences, irresistible trance states, crucifixion, and the like. The panic state may be more or less severe, lasting from a few hours to several months, and the metabolic disturbances attending such dissociations of the personality, because the autonomic reactions produced by fear may be quite serious.
As Warren Johansson has pointed out, “[i]t is significant that the concept of homosexual panic emerged in the United States just after World War I, when for the first time since 1865 large numbers of men were brought together in training camps and military bases with no members of the opposite sex present (Johansson in Dynes et al. 1990).
While Kempf’s concept has been largely discarded, it is still sometimes invoked as a legal defense--the “gay panic defense.” In such situations, the perpetrator of a homophobic attack is alleged to have lost control because of the overwhelming pressure of the panic he experiences. However, the validity of this approach is usually subject to challenge in the court room.
There were also some instances of anticipation of Kinsey’s method of using case histories. A remarkable instance is due to Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher (1863-1940), who taught in Stanford University’s hygiene department. Mosher created what may well rank the first American sex survey. She started it in 1892 as a 28-year-old biology undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin; she had been asked to address a local Mother's Club on "the marital relation" and as a single, childless woman seems to have turned to data collection to fill gaps in her knowledge. Afterward, Mosher continued conducting surveys until 1920, using variations on the same form and amassing 45 profiles in all.
The Mosher Survey recorded not only women's sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children, and contraception. Some of the women spoke with surprising frankness. One, born in 1844, called sex "a normal desire" and observed that "a rational use of it tends to keep people healthier." Offered another, born in 1862, "[t]he highest devotion is based upon it, a very beautiful thing, and I am glad nature gave it to us.”
A kind of closet sexologist, Dr. Mosher deemed it unwise to publish her results; they remained unknown until the historian Carl Degler rediscovered them in the 1970s.
Another pioneering researcher was Robert Latou Dickinson (1861-1950), an obstetrician and gynecologist who conducted studies concerning female sexuality between 1890 and 1920. Gradually he assembled data from 5200 case histories. In some instances he was able to follow the subjects through several periods of their lives, showing changes in behavior. A trained artist, Dickinson also made sketches of genitalia and sexual intercourse. Most of his findings were only published late in life.
KINSEY
We turn now to the central figure in this first American paradigm. Alfred Charles Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, in Hoboken, New Jersey where his father was a professor at Stephens Institute of Technology. His formative years were both promising and unpromising. For most of his childhood Kinsey's parents were poor, and the boy often went without proper medical care. His bout with rickets caused curvature of the spine, resulting in a slight stoop. Kinsey's parents were strict Methodists; his extremely devout father imposed strict rules on the household including mandating Sunday as a day of prayer. While Kinsey became a religious skeptic in later life, the single-mindedness and discipline inherent in his father’s approach left an enduring impress.
The young Kinsey showed great interest in nature and camping, which he did in conjunction with the YMCA and the Boy Scouts. Even though a childhood disease had weakened his heart, Kinsey practiced an intense regime of difficult hikes and camping expeditions throughout his early life. In this he may have been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by Theodore Roosevelt, who similarly struggled overcome handicaps by practicing the “strenuous life.”
In high school Kinsey was a hard-working student with little interest in sports. At one time, he aspired to become a concert pianist, but decided to concentrate on his scientific pursuits instead, where he was drawn to biology, botany, and zoology. After two unhappy years at Stevens Institute of Technology, in the fall of 1914 he transferred to Bowdon College in Maine, where he could focus on biology, in particularly on insect research. He continued his graduate studies at Harvard University’s Bussey Institute, where he worked under the eminent entomologist William Morton Wheeler. Kinsey chose to produce his doctoral thesis on gall wasps, collecting samples of the species with zeal. After receiving his Harvard Sc.D. degree, he published several papers in 1920 under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, essentially introducing the gall wasp to the scientific community. Of the more than 18 million insects in the museum's collection, an astounding 5 million are gall wasps collected by Kinsey.
Having joined the faculty of Indiana University, Kinsey married Clara Bracken McMillen, known as “Mac,” in 1921. They had four children, of whom one died in childhood. Kinsey wrote a widely used high-school textbook, An Introduction to Biology (1926), basically supporting the principles of Darwininian Evolution. Kinsey also co-wrote a classic book entitled Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America (1943) with Merritt Lyndon Fernald. He continued his research on gall wasps.
With this background, Kinsey’s turn to the systematic study of human sexuality seemed somewhat surprising. About 1933, however, he became interested in the different forms of sexual practices, after discussing the topic extensively with a colleague, Robert Kroc. In 1935, Kinsey delivered a lecture to a faculty discussion group at Indiana University, wherein he attacked the "widespread ignorance of sexual structure and physiology" and promoted his view that "delayed marriage" (that is, delayed sexual experience) was psychologically harmful.
In due course Kinsey obtained research funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to conduct sustained field work documenting into human sexual behavior in America. Published in an austere scientific form by a a medical publisher, his two Kinsey Reports—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female—reached the top of bestseller lists and turned the Indiana University professor into an instant celebrity. Articles about him appeared in popular magazines such as Time, Life, Look and McCall’s. The storm of controversy stirred up by Kinsey's reports was a major contributor to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. While this turbulence served to convey much useful information in a formerly taboo subject, it made the continuation of his work more difficult. Indiana University's president Herman B. Wells staunchly defended Kinsey's research in what became a well-known test of academic freedom.
KINSEY'S REPORTS
The key feature of his classification of sexual orientation is that in the Reports Kinsey rejected the simple dichotomy of heterosexual vs. homosexual, preferring to use a seven-point scale instead. The Kinsey scale attempts to describe a person's sexual history or episodes of their sexual activity at a given time. It goes from 0, meaning exclusively heterosexual to 6, meaning exclusively homosexual. There are thus five categories that can be loosely termed bisexual, though Kinsey avoided this term. Standing apart from the main points of the scale was an additional grade, noted as “X,” which was used for asexuality.
Kinsey explained his reasoning as follows. “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.
“While emphasizing the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history [...] An individual may be assigned a position on this scale, for each period in his life. [...] A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist." [Kinsey, et al. (1948). pp. 639, 656].
The main scale is as follows:
0 -- Exclusively heterosexual
1 -- Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2 -- Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 -- Equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 -- Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 -- Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6 -- Exclusively homosexual
In his article on “Incidence” in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (1990), C.A. Tripp concisely summed up Kinsey’s conclusions regarding sexual orientation.
“[The] scale not only takes into account differences in the balance between heterosexual and homosexual actions, but also allows an investigator to consider "psychologic reactions" in arriving at each rating. Thus two people might both be rated "6"-for being exclusively homosexual, with one of them living out his or her experiences, while the other might have as little as no overt activity of this kind - for reasons ranging from moral inhibitions to simply a lack of opportunity. Ordinarily, it is easy to arrive at a single rating for a person's mental and physical responses. But whenever the two are in sharp discord (such as when a man has most or all of his sexual activity with women, but requires homosexual fantasies to actually reach orgasm), there is much to criticize in the compromises implicit in the 0-6 Scale. (To such complaints Kinsey simply pointed out that while rating difficulties and imperfections are, indeed, apparent in some cases, it is nevertheless useful, the best rating device so far, and that more is gained by using than by ignoring it.) The combination of applying these measures of incidence, of frequency, and of placement on the 0-6 Scale (tabulated yearly or for a lifetime) not only permitted the Kinsey Research to cast out oversimplified stereotypes long used in defining heterosexual and homosexual variations, but to off er a variety of samples of its white male population, among them that: 58 percent of the males who belong to the group that goes into high school but not beyond, 59 percent of the grade school level, and 47 percent of the college level have had homosexual experience to the point of orgasm if they remain single to the age of 35. 13 percent of males react erotically to other males without having overt homosexual contacts after the onset of adolescence. [This 13 percent, coupled with the 37 percent who do have overt homosexual experience, means that a full 50 percent of males have at least some sexual response to other males after adolescence - and conversely, that only the other 50 percent of the male population is entirely heterosexual throughout life.) 25 percent of the male population has more than incidental homosexual experience or reactions [i.e., rates 2-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 18 percent of males have at least as much homosexual as heterosexual experience in their histories (i.e., rate 3-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 13 percent of the male population has more homosexual than heterosexual experience (i.e., rates 4 - 6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 8 percent of males are exclusively homosexual (i.e., rate 6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 4 percent of males are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives after the onset of adolescence. (Kinsey, 1948, pp. 650-51)”
Kinsey held that the words heterosexual and homosexual should never be used as nouns but only as adjectives, representing behaviors, rather than persons. This preference accords with the Anglo-Saxon inclination to empiricism and nominalism. The sheer number of interviews is impressive: 5300 for the male volume, 6000 for the female one. While Kinsey took pains to acquaint himself with the more theoretically inclined European sex research, he chose his own approach, in part out of personal preference but also because of a sense that such sober factuality, backed up as it was by massive data, would be more acceptable to the American public, which was in those days generally reticent about discussion of sex in a serious (that is, nonsensationalist) fashion,
Those who have concluded that some 10% of the American population is predominantly homosexual rely on their interpretation of the tables in the Reports. However, various conclusions can be drawn from the data, and (as noted above) Kinsey disapproved of using terms like homosexual or heterosexual to describe individuals, maintaining that sexuality is prone to change over time, and that sexual behavior can be understood both as physical contact as well as purely psychological phenomena (desire, sexual attraction, fantasy). After reading the first Kinsey volume, Harry Hay, the founder of the American gay movement, concluded that Kinsey’s data showed that homosexual were a separate people. Kinsey would have completely rejected this interpretation.
CRITICS OF KINSEY'S FINDINGS
Early on, academic criticisms appeared concerning sample selection and sample bias in the research underlying the Reports. Two main problems cited were that significant portions of the samples come from prison populations and male prostitutes, and that people who volunteer to be interviewed about a taboo subject are likely to suffer from the problem of self-selection. If these criticisms could be substantiated, they would undermine the usefulness of the sample in terms of determining the tendencies of the overall population.
Critics zeroed in on what they regarded the over-representation of some groups in the sample: in the subjects used for the male volume, 25% were, or had been, 5% inmates, and 5% were male prostitutes. In response, Paul Gebhard Kinsey's successor as director of the Indiana University Institute, produced a new statistical analysis, ostensibly cleansing the Kinsey data of purported contaminants, removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in the basic sample. In 1979, Gebhard (with Alan B. Johnston) published The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938–1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research. The authors concluded that none of Kinsey's original estimates were significantly affected by this bias: that is, prison population, male prostitutes, and those who willingly participated in discussion of previously taboo sexual topics had the same statistical tendency as the general population. However, Kinsey had a particular fascination with individuals that we would now call gay, and probably over-represented these in his general samples, accounting for the apparent concordance between the prison/prostitute group and the general sample.
After Kinsey’s death information came to light that in his later years Kinsey’s personal orientation had became more and more homosexual. For many years this information was suppressed by Kinsey’s associates, suggesting that they believed that it might tend to discredit his results concerning the frequency of homosexual behavior. At this late date it is probably impossible to determine the truth of this controversy. Suffice it to say that Kinsey’s data for homosexual behavior in American white males (blacks were not included in the study) indicated that this conduct was considerably higher than anyone had considered heretofore. In particular, Kinsey showed that many individuals who would have regarded themselves (and been regarded) as totally straight were capable of fairly extensive same-sex conduct.
IMITATORS
The Kinsey Reports sparked a host of imitators in the United States and abroad. Several studies, produced by associates and followers of Kinsey were intended as followups. One such is Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity among Men and Women (1978), This ambitious study examines the various ways individuals have made social and psychological adjustments to their homosexuality. The monograph is based on interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay area with 1500 individuals (including black men and women, groups omitted from the two Kinsey studies) in a project supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. The book has attracted criticism on several grounds: (1) the limitation to San Francisco makes extrapolation to the rest of North America problematic; (2) interviewing standards are unclear; (3) the proposed typology of specific kinds of partnerships or lifestyles— close-coupled, open-coupled, functional, dysfunctional, and asexual—is of uncertain value.
This work had its own sequel, Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith, Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women (1981). Reviewing the existing literature, the authors conclude that there is no significant correlation between early family experience and adult sexual preference and therefore that sexual preference must be controlled essentially by biological-constitutional factors. Although further evidence has appeared subsequently, this conclusion remains controversial in some quarters.
In 1990 the Kinsey Institute published "Homosexuality/Heterosexuality: Concepts of Sexual Orientation," edited by David McWhirter and others. The authors found that 13.95% of males and 4.25% of females having had either "extensive" or "more than incidental" homosexual experience.
For a time, a male-female team of researchers, William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, vied for prestige with Alfred Kinsey and his associates. Working at their own institution, the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation, St. Louis, they produced Human Sexual Response in 1966. They supplemented Kinsey by producing more detailed accounts of the physiology of the sexual act. This volume (no longer much read) contains little on homosexuality, for which see their Homosexuality in Perspective (1979).
Because the controversy made funding harder to find, some resorted to the so-called “convenience method,” in which samples would left in various public places for those who wished to to respond. Naturally, these exhibit volunteer bias, and must be judged accordingly. Among these contributions is Sherry Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality (1978). This book purports to summarize the responses of 3000 American women to a questionnaire concerning their own sexuality. This book launched the fashion for a series of pop avatars of Kinsey. As samples they are almost worthless, but they reveal much of changing fashions--in this instance Hite's own feminist concepts of sexuality. The author also produced The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (1981).New York: Knopf, 1981; 1129 pp.). Similar efforts were produced for gays and lesbians by Karla Jay and Allen Young (1979) and by James Spada (1979).
For some years serious research languished, though there was some effort to replicate the Kinsey results in Western European countries. Then in 1994 a team headed by Edward O. Laumann of the University of Chicago produced their “The Social Organization of Sexuality.” This book reports on the findings of the National Health and Social Life Survey, a 1992 nationwide study of 3432 American men and women between the ages of 18 and 59. Beginning with the theoretical foundations, rationale for, and design of the methodology, the authors put the work in historical context, urging caution about interpretation and implications of their sometimes surprising findings. Though the study was designed largely to "fill significant gaps in our knowledge of sexual behavior associated with the acquisition of the AIDS virus," this study attempted a reexamination of masturbation, sexually transmitted infections, cohabitation and marriage, fertility, and homosexuality. A significant portion of the National Health and Life study was geared towards homosexuality. The results found that 8.6% of women and 10.1% of men had at one point in their life experienced some form of homosexuality. Of these, 87% of women and 76% of men reported current same-sex attraction. 41% of women and 52% of men had sex with someone of the same gender, and 16% of women and 27% of men identified as GLBT.
In 2010 findings from the National Survey of Health and Behavior (NSSHB) study were reported. Indiana University sex researchers interviewed nearly 6,000 people nationwide between the ages of 14 and 94. The NSSHB results indicated enormous variability in the sexual repertoires of U.S. adults, with more than 40 combinations of sexual activity described at adults’ most recent sexual event. The researchers found that 7 percent of women and 8 percent of men identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual. By age 50, 15% of men have had at least one oral sex encounter with another man.
INTERNATIONAL COUNTERPARTS
The closing years of the twentieth century saw an upsurge of studies of sexual behavior in various nations, with particular emphasis on sexual orientation. For most, however, the usual caveats regarding sampling and volunteerism apply.
In 2001-02 the largest and most thorough survey in Australia to date was conducted by telephone interview with 19,307 respondents between the ages of 16 and 59. The study found that 97.4% of men identified as heterosexual, 1.6% as gay and 0.9% as bisexual. For women 97.7% identified as heterosexual, 0.8% as lesbian and 1.4% as bisexual. However, 8.6% of men and 15.1% of women reported either feelings of attraction to the same gender or some sexual experience with the same gender. Half the men and two-thirds of the women who had same-sex sexual experience regarded themselves as heterosexual rather than homosexual.
A 2003 survey of 135,000 Canadians found that 1.0% of the respondents identified themselves as homosexual, while 0.7% identified themselves as bisexual. About 1.3% of men considered themselves homosexual, almost 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. In the 18-35 age bracket, 2.0% considered themselves to be either homosexual or bisexual, but the number decreased to 1.9% among 35–44 year olds, and further still to 1.2% in the population aged 45–59. Quebec and British Columbia had higher percentages than the national average -- 2.3% and 1.9%, respectively.
In France, a 1992 study of 20,055 people found that 4.1% of the men and 12.6% of the women had at least one occurrence of intercourse with person of the same sex during their lifetime.
In a 1988 random survey of 6,300 Norwegians, 3.5% of the men and 3% of the women reported that they had a homosexual experience sometime in their life. Also in that country, according to the Durex Global Sex Survey for 2003, 12% of Norwegian respondents have had homosexual sex.
In the United Kingdom a 1992 study of 8,337 British men found that 6.1% have had a homosexual experience." and 3.6% had "1+ homosexual partner ever." In 2005 the HM Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry completed a survey to help the Government analyze the financial implications of the Civil Partnerships Act (such as pensions, inheritance and tax benefits). They concluded that there were 3.6 million gay people in the United Kingdom – around 6% of the total population or 1 in 16.66 people. Finally, in 2010 a representative survey of 238,206 Britons found 1% were gay or lesbian and .5% were bisexual. A further 0.5% self-identified as "other," and 3% responded as "do not know" or refused to answer.
UPDATE (April 19, 2011)
A recent study produced under the auspices of the Williams Institute has generated considerable discussion and controversy. The following summary stems from several news sources. Note that the study emphasized identification. Not included, presumably would be most members of the mostly African American DL group who have same-sex relations but do not classify themselves as gay. Overall, the results suggest greater fluidity of orientation than some gay advocacy groups have been prepared to grant. Here is the summary:
An estimated 9 million Americans -- or nearly 4 percent of the total population -- say they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to a new report released this week from the Williams Institute, a think-tank devoted to LGBT research at UCLA.
Bisexuals make up slightly more than half that group, 1.8 percent of the total U.S. population, and they are substantially more likely to be women than men.
Ostensibly, the report is the most up-to-date assessment of that population. Not unlike most of the other studies noted in above account, it produced a lower population percentage than the 10 percent number that advocacy groups have used in the past, deriving from their interpretation of the 1948 Kinsey Report.
The new data come on the heels of another recent report published by the Institute of Medicine for the National Institutes of Health emphasizing the need for more federally funded research on LGBT health problems.
"Sexual orientation is complex, but measurable," said Gary J. Gates, chief researcher and a Williams Distinguished Scholar. "Hopefully, this will begin to prompt some dialogue on what it."
Other key findings were that an estimated 19 million Americans, or 8.2 percent of the population, said they have engaged in same-sex behavior, and 25.6 million, or 11 percent, acknowledged some same-sex attraction.
While there has been skepticism in some quarters, some gay advocacy groups are hailing the report as a critical first step to inform public policy, research and federal funding. They maintain that the information is crucial in identifying health and economic disparities, discrimination, domestic partnership benefits. and the impact of same-sex marriage.
The report was based on a collection of previous surveys in the United States and around the world.
"All were surveys based on population and we tried to take precautions to minimize biases," said Gates. "Many people still have the 10 percent number in their head," he said of Kinsey, who published his studies in sexual behavior at Indiana University in the 1940s and 1950s.
"Kinsey didn't use a population-based sample, so regardless of the point-estimate, it came from a self-selected group of men," said Gates. "For example, prisoners represented a higher proportion of men in his sample than they would in the population, perhaps biasing the sample toward more same-sex sexual behavior."
Gates said the lower number did not surprise researchers, but it might be new to the general population.
According to Gates, gay advocates adopted the 10 percent number in the late 1960s and 1970s.
"That 10 percent emerges as much a decision of politics as a decision of science, which is not to say Kinsey was not a scholar and scientist," he noted.
But, he added, it was "kind of a smart number -- big enough to kind of matter and not so large that it was threatening to a population that was uncomfortable with it.
"You can argue it was a brilliant strategy and it seemed to resonate with people," he said. "One of the things the study shows, perhaps, is a little bit of maturity of the movement. We can now use more traditional ways to assess the population."
The 3.5 percent of those who identify as LGB may or may not include those who are "closeted," according to Gates. "We actually did commission data within the survey and asked about to what degree they were closeted," Gates said, "and 13 percent who identified as LGB had never told anyone about it."
The most striking results were the data on bisexuals, which made up about half of the overall LGB population. Of those who identified as such, 25 percent said they were closeted.
"Many are still quite discreet about their sexual orientation," Gates said. "If you ask people in the bisexual population, they will tell you it's a different kind of a stigma they experience. Some don't feel completely at home in the LG community because they often think of them as being way too gay and hold them with a level of suspicion. And in general, they are subject to the general stigma of same-sex behavior."
Gates also cautioned against the results that 11 percent of all Americans had same-sex attractions.
"That was only from one survey and it was restricted to 18- to 44-year-olds," he said.
Respondents had to rate their attraction from exclusive opposite-sex attraction (5) in graduating degrees of same-sex feelings (4 to 1).
"Some in category 4 may be people like me who avoid 1s and 5s in surveys," Gates said.
The U.S. Census does not count how many Americans identify as LGBT, although later this year it will release its count of same-sex spouses.
REFERENCES
"AIDS and Sexual Behaviour in France: ACSF Investigators," Nature 360 (6403), 407–9. (December 1992).
Bell, Alan P., and Martin S. Weinberg. Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity among Men and Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
Bell, Alan P., Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith. Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981 (with additional volume, Statistical Appendix, 1981).
Black, Dan, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor. "Demographics of the Gay and Lesbian Population in the United States: Evidence from Available Systematic Data Sources," Demography 37 (2), 139–154 (2002).
Dynes, Wayne R., et al. eds. The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1990.
Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Gebhard, Paul, and Alan B. Johnson. The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938-1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute of Sex Research. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1979.
Gebhard, Paul et al. Sex Offenders. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
Hite, Sherry. The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1976.
----. The Hite Report on Male Sexuality. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Jay, Karla, and Allen Young. The Gay Report. New York: Summit Books,
Jones, James H. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Kinsey, Alfred C. Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul Gebhard. Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953.
Kinsey, Alfred C. Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948.
Masters, William H., and Virginia Johnson. Homosexuality in Perspective. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
----. Human Sexual Response, Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.
McWhirter, David P., Stephanie A. Saunders, and June Machover Reinisch. Homosexuality/Heterosexuality: Concepts of Sexual Orientation. (The Kinsey Institute Series), New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Sex in Australia: The Australian Study of Health and Relationships, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society [2002]. (Published as the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, vol. 27, no 2.)
Simon, Pierre (with Claude Lévy). Rapport sur le comportement sexuel des Français. Paris: Julliard, 1972.
Spada, James, The Spada Report: The Newest Survey of Gay Male Sexuality. New York: New American Library, 1979.
Sundet, J.M., et al. Prevalence of Risk-prone Sexual Behaviour in the General Population of Norway. In: Global Impact of AIDS, edited by Alan F. Fleming et al. New York: Alan R. Liss, 1988, 53–60.
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