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View Full Version : Demographer: US has 4M adults who identify as gay



KarlMarx
04-08-2011, 05:35 AM
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — How many gay men and lesbians are there in the United States? Gary Gates has an idea but acknowledges pinpointing a solid figure remains an elusive task.

Gates is demographer-in-residence at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a think tank based at the University of California, Los Angeles. For the institute's 10th anniversary this week, he took a scholarly stab at answering the question that has been debated, avoided, parsed and proven both insoluble and political since pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey said in the 1940s that 10 percent of the men he surveyed were "predominantly homosexual."

Gates' best estimate, derived from five studies that have asked subjects about their sexual orientation, is that the nation has about 4 million adults who identify as being gay or lesbian, representing 1.7 percent of the 18-and-over population....remainder of article at

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gMalA70bwj-kM-a8yy13MTSESdoQ?docId=186e417a96794d5f8f54a71c5e051 d7f

1.7 percent is way below the often cited figure of 10 percent of the population.