LGBT News CDC survey says less than 3% of population is gay or lesbien.

Woah, that's a little hard to believe.

 

it seems like it's based on health issues only. they can't really FULLY scale the amount of LGBT individuals there are in USA. it also mentions in the article that they just started looking into Bisexuality.

 

Surveys aren't the best way to come to a conclusion on something like this, just saying. It's impossible to ask every individual, and many people will lie about or repress their homosexuality due to homophobia.

 

What about closeted people?

 

Exactly, unless you ask every single person in this country and they all give completely honest answers then these polls are pretty much useless.

 

Yeah, the article isn't working for me. I'm not convinced of that conclusion. There seem to be a fair number of gay people who realise they're gay later in life. And honestly, I suspect the number of bisexuals either pretending to be straight or in denial could be quite high.

 

3%? Whatever happened to "1 out of every 10 people is gay/lesbian?"

 

There have been many, many surveys done in various countries recently all putting the amount of non-straight people at 2 to 4 % at the most, which tbh frustrates me, it's hard enough finding a partner as it is.

I guess we'll have to part with Kinsey's 10% already, but I also think that not everyone answers surveys truthfully and not everyone who sleeps with the same sex will consider themselves not straight, for some reason...
So I usually go by 5% these days, which sounds reasonable to me.

 

My thoughts exactly, you can't go to door and door ask everyone and if you do, many will lie about it and others may not even know about it until later in life. Sexuality is complicated. If we lived in a non homophobic world, I'm sure the numbers would be different.

 

I thought we'd be at least 10%. This is terrible...

 

I think there are two important factors at work here.

First, is the fact that this was based on self-reporting. As the Williams Institute itself notes, this is not a very good way of determining actual population data for LGB people. It's been found that people will lie even on anonymous surveys out of fear of being outed, assuming they've even come to terms with being gay. There are still a lot of people out there living in the closet or in denial. We know this based off of involuntary data collected through things like anonymous internet searches, which reveals an estimated 5% of the population of the United States as possibly LGB. That's not much higher than the number given here, but it's close enough to the self-reported data to be a creditable number of those not actively self reporting.

Second, there is always the danger of looking at a small percentage and thinking that it actually means a small number of people. When in fact, when we are talking about 2.3% (the figure in the article), we're talking about an estimated 7,324,322 people in the United States alone. For perspective, this would make the LGB population in the United States the 13th largest state, beating out Washington state, and nearly Virginia as well.

This may still seem like a small amount, until you realize that the United States is one of the most populous countries in the world. Then you realize the population of LGB people in the United States means there are more LGB people living here than there are total people living in places such as: Jordan, Hong Kong, El Salvador, Libya, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, Palestine, Lebanon, and Singapore. In fact, if you add the population of Ireland, Iceland, and Qatar together you'd still have hundreds of thousands of more LGB people living in the United States than total people who live in those countries combined.

However, let's actually take that 2.3% and apply it to the world population figures. That's an estimated 165,119,898 people world wide. That would make the LGB population of the world the 8th largest country on planet Earth. We're talking bigger than the Philippines, Mexico, Japan, and Russia. It's nearly three times the size of the entire U.K.

So, it's important for perspective to realize just how "big" 2.3% really is when compared to other things.

 

This. 100000% this. Thank you

Can't stand when bigots use the "why should we appease to 2% of the population argument." This proves that there are a lot of us and probably more than what people think.

 

I agree with this.

 

I wouldn't say 7 million is insignificant and most would agree, even if the total is much higher, 7 million is still a massive amount of people. That's as many as some states. And I would argue that being closeted skews the results by quite a wide margin, many states are still very conservative, and accepting your sexuality isn't as easy as accepting something like handedness. This is why stats in regards to the population need to be taken with a grain of salt, must objective sources agree. We know that we're the minority, it doesn't matter what stats say, be it 2% or 15% but the point is that even a little is a lot in terms of our population; even if it's a small amount in the grand scheme of things, it's still millions of people.

 

In my department at work, we have 26 employees: myself, openly gay, another person, married and lesbian, and an openly bisexual person. So we're pretty much at 10%. And that's probably true of the greater library, where I would guess at least 10% of the more than 200 employees are GLBT. I think it depends on the setting, and how comfortable people are being out, to others, and even to themselves. I don't think this study takes into account how deeply repressed so many people still are, especially in deeply conservative/religious areas, or how they might be afraid to answer a survey in the age of NSA and government spying. Many people are just not going to give an honest answer, of fall between the lines.