Gay and Lesbian Populations
From Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality
It is estimated that in the United States roughly one in twenty persons—5 percent of the population—may be attracted primarily to a member of his or her own sex. However, the number of individuals who have engaged in homosexual behavior is a subject of debate, based primarily on objections to the validity of data provided by existing studies.
Homosexuality surveys have not always been based on groups randomly drawn from the population, and questions have been raised about the reliability of self-reported data obtained from such studies and about the biases of their authors. Another issue concerns a lack of consensus on how to define homosexuality. In the 1940s Alfred Kinsey proposed a seven-point scale: A “0” on the Kinsey scale was assigned to persons who denied ever having any physical attraction to a member of their own sex—a “pure heterosexual.” Kinsey assigned a “1” to subjects having experienced a physical attraction but who never had sexual contact with a person of their own sex. Kinsey “2,” “3,” and “4” subjects were persons who reported bisexual activity but with increasing homosexual preponderance, “3”s being persons who were equally excited about and involved with both sexes. “5” was assigned to persons who may have reported heterosexual attractions but who never had sex with the opposite sex, and “6” was assigned to someone who was exclusively homosexually attracted. A final category, “X,” was used to rate persons who reported not responding erotically to either heterosexual or homosexual stimuli, nor having physical contacts with persons of either sex. Although few males beyond puberty could be assigned “X,” nearly 20 percent of females remained in this category after adulthood.
One of Kinsey’s findings of little dispute was that age at the time of the reported sexual activity is a key variable in determining the prevalence of homosexual experiences. For example, about half of the older males (48 percent) and nearly two-thirds (60 percent) of the preadolescent boys interviewed reported homosexual activity in their preadolescent years. Although exhibitionism was the most common behavior reported, two-thirds of the men with such homosexual experience also reported mutual masturbation, and 17 percent reported trying anal penetration. As men reached their late teens and early twenties, the frequency of homosexual contact subsided greatly, especially among the group that went to college. Thus, prevalence depends on age and other social factors.
The earlier (1940s) Kinsey studies have been criticized as not being representative of the entire population: they drew heavily from residents of college and university communities and from delinquent and prison groups. However, as unrepresentative as their subjects may have been of the entire population of the United States, the numbers of Kinsey’s subjects (5,300 males; 5,940 females) were forty times greater than the sizes of previous studies of human sexuality, and the data was obtained by a highly trained, nonjudgmental staff, who may have gathered the best in-depth, standardized data to date.
The validity of data obtained by self-report, whether gathered from a questionnaire or by personal interviews, is often considered suspect, unless more “hard” data (e.g., laboratory serologies) or unobtrusive corroborating data provide confirmation. Yet virtually all data on human sexuality (except for studies on sexual physiology or performance, like those obtained by Masters and Johnson) are based on self-reports. Nevertheless, one may check the validity of self-reported data using a number of methods, including collecting the same data at a later date (test-retest reliability) and inserting redundant questions with different phrasings to check on key issues. Most confirmatory studies, in fact, show that self-reported data is quite reliable.
Given considerations about levels of homo- and heterosexuality, the effects of age, and doubts about self-reported data, what are the best guesses about the prevalence of male-to-male and female-to-female sex? For males it appears that about 20–30 percent of preadolescent males have some homosexual experience, many to the point of orgasm, and that 6–10 percent may continue to have predominantly homosexual experiences. Less is known about bisexually active men; however, researchers have guessed that there may be an almost equal number of men who are predominately sexually active with women but have some homosexual contact. The earlier Kinsey data and the most recent study reported in the scientific literature (Fay et al., Science, 1989), which drew conclusions from a random study done in 1970, gathering data by self-completed questionnaires, came to similar conclusions. Fay reported that at least 20 percent of men have had a sexual experience culminating in orgasm with another man, nearly 7 percent had such an experience after age nineteen, and 2 percent had it within the previous two years. But the authors believed there might have been under-reporting of these behaviors.
Among the females in the large 1940s Kinsey studies, by age forty, 28 percent reported psychological arousal in response to another female, 19 percent reported some physical sexual contact, and 13 percent reported achieving orgasm with another female. The authors comment, however, that because their female samples included “a disproportionate number of females in college and graduate groups, where the incidences of lesbian practices seem to be higher than in the grade school and high school groups, the figures” for their sample population might be higher than might be found in the American population as a whole. For nearly half of the women reporting homosexual activity, this was limited to only a year or less in their lives and roughly the same proportion (51 percent) reported having homosexual relations with only a single partner.
Kinsey’s data suggests that females with homosexual experience are distinct from men in regard to the numbers of partners they report. Only 20 percent of these females reported homosexual experiences with two or more partners, 29 percent with three, and 4 percent with more than ten partners, while among men with same-sex experience, a high proportion reported contacts with several different persons and 22 percent with more than ten partners.
In summary, the proportions of the samples of males and females who reported homosexual responses and activities were higher for males than for females. Furthermore, a much smaller proportion of females than of males remained homosexually active as they aged. Nevertheless, many persons have homosexual erotic responses, engage in sexual activity, and achieve orgasm with a member of their own sex, and perhaps one in twenty Americans remains primarily attracted to and sexually active with members of their own sex (see also bisexuality).
