Subject: Homosexuals and the 10% Fallacy
Date: Published: 3/31/93 (158 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Homosexuals and the 10% Fallacy
    ---
    By J. Gordon Muir

    How many Americans are homosexual?
    For years, conventional wisdom has said that 10% or more of the
 population is gay.  Derived from surveys in the 1940s by pioneer sex
 researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, the one-in-10 figure is routinely cited
 in academic works, sex education materials, government reports and
 the media.  The 10% estimate also has been used extensively by
 activists lobbying for gay-affirmation programs and extensions of
 family benefits to homosexual employees of major corporations, as
 well as seen as evidence of gays' voting clout.
    But there long has been much evidence that the 10% estimate is
 far too high.  Surveys with large samples from the U. S., Canada,
 Britain, France, Norway, Denmark and other nations give a picture of
 homosexuality experience rates of 6% or less, with an exclusive
 homosexuality prevalence of 1% or less.
    The most comprehensive example is the continuing survey conducted
 by the U. S. Census Bureau since 1988 for the National Center for
 Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control.  The survey,
 which polls about 10,000 subjects quarterly on "AIDS Knowledge and
 Attitudes," asks confidentially if any of several statements is
 true, including this one:  "you are a man who has had sex with
 another man at some time since 1977, even one time."  No more than 2%
 to 3% of the more than 50,000 men surveyed have answered "yes to at
 least one statement."  Since some yes answers were given to the four
 other questions (blood transfusions, intravenous drug use, etc.),
 the data strongly suggest that the prevalence of even incidental
 homosexual behavior is less than 2% for men.  Most studies report
 that women have about half of the male prevalence rate, so a general
 population estimate for homosexuality would fall below 1.5%.  A
 national poll showed that 2.4% of voters in the 1992 presidential
 election described themselves as homosexual.
    Numerous other surveys reveal similar percentages.  Father-son
 researchers Paul and Kirk Cameron have compiled a new report, "The
 Prevalence of Homosexuality" (scheduled to be published in
 Psychological Reports), that summarizes more than 30 surveys with
 "large, plausibly unbiased samples."  Here are a few of them:
    -- France:  A 1991-92 government survey of 20,055 adults reports
 that 1.4% of men and 0.4% of women had had homosexual intercourse in
 the five years preceding the survey.  The exclusive lifetime
 homosexual rates were 0.7% for men and 0.6% for women; lifetime
 homosexuality experience was 4.1% for men and 2.6% for women.
    -- Britain:  A 1990-91 nation-wide survey of 18,876 adults aged 16
 to 59 reports that 1.4% of men had had homosexual contact in the
 five years preceding the survey.  Only 6.1% of men had any lifetime
 homosexual experience.
    -- U. S.:  A nation-wide 1989 household sample of 1,537 adults
 conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University
 of Chicago finds that of sexually active adults over 18, 1.2% of
 males and 1.2% of females reported homosexual activity in the year
 preceding the survey; 4.9% to 5.6% of both sexes reported since age
 18 having had partners of both genders, and 0.6% to 0.7% exclusively
 homosexual partners.
    -- U. S.:  A stratified cluster sample from the Minnesota
 Adolescent Health Survey (1986-87) of 36,741 public school students
 in seventh through 12th grade found that 0.6% of the boys and 0.2%
 of the girls identified themselves as "most or 100% homosexual";
 0.7% of the boys and 0.8% of the girls identified themselves as
 "bisexual"; and 10.1% of males and 11.3% of females were "unsure."
    -- Canada:  A nation-wide cluster random sample of 5,514
 first-year college students under age 25 finds 98% heterosexual, 1%
 bisexual, 1% homosexual.
    -- Norway:  A 1987 nation-wide random mail sample of 6,155 adults
 age 18-60 finds that 0.9% of males and 0.9% of females had
 homosexual experiences within three years of the survey, and 3.5% of
 males and 3% of females had ever had any homosexual experience.
    -- Denmark:  A 1989 stratified random sample of 3,178 adults age
 18-59 finds homosexual intercourse reported by 2.7% of sexually
 experienced males.  Less than 1% of men were exclusively homosexual.
    Many other studies also vary greatly from the Kinsey research,
 which in retrospect has little validity.  (The widely publicized new
 "Janus Report" -- "9% of men and 5% of women may be considered
 homosexuals" -- was based on a nonrandom sample, among other
 problems.  Methodological flaws are likely to have contributed to its
 out-of-step results.)  
    Among Kinsey's most serious flaws:
    -- About 25% of Kinsey's 5,300 male subjects were former or
 present prisoners; a high percentage were sex offenders (he had the
 histories of about 1,400).  Many respondents were recruited from sex
 lectures, where they had gone to get the answer to sex problems;
 others were recruited by underworld figures and leaders of
 homosexual groups.  At least 200 male prostitutes were among his
 interviewees, and could have amounted to as much as 4% of his
 sample.  Some groups were underrepresented, such as church attenders;
 others were missing entirely.  Kinsey represented this as a
 "carefully planned population survey."  His alleged mirror of what
 the nation was doing sexually kicked off the sexual revolution.
    Even Kinsey never said that 10% of the population was homosexual,
 only that 10% of men over age 16 are more or less exclusively
 homosexual for periods of up to three years.  (By defining adult as
 age 16 and over, Kinsey misrepresented as adult behavior homosexual
 play among heterosexual adolescents that may have occurred only
 once.)  For women, the figure was about half of the male prevalence.
 As for lifelong, exclusive homosexuality, Kinsey placed the figure
 at 4%, and as for any overt homosexual experience, 37%.
    Kinsey's failings aside, sex surveys should never be considered
 as singularly definitive, because of the problem of volunteer bias;
 many people don't want to discuss their most intimate sexual natures
 with a clipboard-bearing stranger or an anonymous telephone
 interviewer.  The refusal rate for sex surveys ranges widely, with
 some reporting rejections of more than 50%.  Although homosexuals
 contend that social stigma prevents them from full representation in
 surveys, researchers have found that the sexually unconventional are
 more eager to discuss sex than people are generally.
    Although Kinsey had been criticized early on by other scientists,
 including psychologist Abraham Maslow (whose advice he ignored), the
 10% fallacy was revealed in the mid-1980s when statisticians began
 tracking AIDS cases.  Adapting the 10% estimate and known rates of
 infection with HIV among gay men, New York City's department of
 health grossly overestimated the size of the city's HIV-infected gay
 population as 250,000 (indirectly placing the total number of
 homosexual-bisexual men at 400,000 to 500,000).  In 1988, these
 figures had to be revised down to 50,000 and 100,000, respectively.
 The Centers for Disease Control has also stopped using the Kinsey
 data for national projections.
    It was no accident that the 10% figure became engraved in stone.
 In their 1989 book, "After the Ball," a blueprint for gay political
 activism, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen boast that "when straights
 are asked by pollsters for a formal estimate, the figure played back
 most often is the `10% gay' statistic which our propagandists have
 been drilling into their heads for years."
    Now that the mythology surrounding Kinsey's homosexuality
 statistics is being laid to rest, perhaps it's time to examine some
 other Kinsey conclusions.  A good place to start would be his
 findings on childhood sexuality.
    Kinsey's research contains the only body of experimental data
 purporting to demonstrate that children from a very young age are
 sexual and have sexual needs.  This wisdom is part of the
 "scientific" foundation of modern sex education, allowing Lester
 Kirkendall, a sex education pioneer and Kinsey colleague, to predict
 in a professional journal in 1985 that once our sense of guilt
 diminishes, cross-generational (adult-child) sex and other forms of
 sexual expression "will become legitimate."
    But the Kinsey "findings" are based on criminal experiments
 conducted by pedophiles who sexually stimulated infants (as young as
 two months) and children against their will, without parental
 consent (obviously), for up to 24 hours at a time.  Kinsey compiled
 these data in a series of tables illustrating normal childhood
 sexual response and orgasmic capacity.  A Lancet reviewer has called
 for an explanation from Kinsey's surviving co-workers.  (None has
 been offered.)  The National Institutes of Health's fraud specialist
 Walter Stewart has called for an investigation.  It's about time.
    ---
    Dr. Muir, a physician and former medical researcher, is
 contributing author, editor and co-publisher of "Kinsey, Sex and
 Fraud" (Huntington House Publishers, 1990).  Robert H. Knight of the
 Family Research Council contributed to this article.

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