“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
-Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride”

Here’s another word people keep using: Homosexual.

So I’m seeing the chatter about how this new Gallup poll (you know…the folks who did so well predicting the outcome of the last election…), gives us a more accurate figure for the percentage of gay people in America than Kinsey’s ten percent, and I can only conclude they aren’t paying attention to what they’re reading, don’t understand where that ten percent figure came from and/or what the Kinsey scale actually was.

Kinsey’s scale of zero through six, where zero (exclusively heterosexual) and six (exclusively homosexual) described the sexual behavior of his subjects over the previous three years of their lives, based on extensive face to face interviews with them. The report stated that ten percent of American males were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55” by grouping the percentages of the five (Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual) and six positions on the scale together to come up with that ten percent figure. Later gay rights activists used this to claim that ten percent of the population is homosexual.

That’s an arguable, but perfectly defensible claim based on Kinsey’s data which, again, came from subjects who were only asked about their actual sexual behavior for the previous three years. But it is measuring a different thing than Gallup asked, which was…

“Do you, personally, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender?”

See the difference? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The problem has always been the percentage of people who are homosexual you get in any given study depends on how the people who did the study define what “homosexual” is.   It seems so clear cut and obvious on the surface of it and yet different people, even in all intellectual honesty about it, have different definitions…let alone those who want to marginalize us when it’s convenient (their numbers are too small for society to cater to their whims), and exaggerate our numbers when convenient (nearly all child molesters are homosexuals…it’s how they perpetuate themselves since they can’t reproduce…).

At this stage in my life, after all I’ve seen of this world, I am still comfortable with that ten percent figure.   But I’m calling it desire, not necessarily how someone behaves or how they self identify.   I Know people, and so do many of us who are gay, who would fit comfortably in either that Kinsey five or six position and yet would nonetheless have assured Gallup that they were heterosexual.   It’s called “The Closet” and a lot of people are still in it….some still in denial, some not.   In my generation and earlier especially, you see a lot of gay men who married young, as a way of turning themselves straight.   Some of these have remained in those marriages, living behind that mask still, after all that has passed by them in the struggle, and I can’t find it in my heart to blame them for that.   They love their wives very much.   Add to that those of us who are out in various stages, even out to everyone they know and work with, and who would be unwilling to answer that question from a stranger.

I still think ten percent is probably right. But even those of us who are militantly out and proud don’t always seem so to the passing stranger.   There is no gay lifestyle.   You likely won’t know unless you are close enough to a person to know, and even then you might not.   And still, even today, many people simply don’t want to know it about themselves. It does not surprise me either that perhaps only three to four percent rather than ten are willing to live openly just as they are, and fight the fight for our human dignity that still needs fighting.

“Do you, personally, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender”, is a question worth asking of course, and maybe someday better researchers than the louts at Gallup will ask that question.   But it’s really not the point.   The word does not mean that.