8 ms·

Americans Greatly Overestimate U.S. Gay Population

91 points by rajnathani 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
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trackofalljades 7y ago
Is it possible that what you're seeing in this data is less about inaccuracy and more about how comfortably out people are? It says the estimates skew greater for younger people and women responding. Well are younger people and women more likely to know which of their friends are LGBT, because of a host of societal reasons that tend to influence men or older folks to wall off their feelings and communicate less about such things? I'm just saying, having lived in more than a dozen locations in five states and a Canadian province for the past several decades, the 4.5% number feels low to me (as in, impossibly so).
- m0th87 7y ago
  4.5% self-report as LGBT. That's an important distinction to make, and I too would be surprised if it's accurate.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    Also, the "what's your estimate" question specifies "gay or lesbian", whereas the self-identity question apparently includes the B and T. Obviously this would make the high estimate for just "gay or lesbian" even further off, but it still doesn't say anything good about the article's conclusion.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
      Maybe a minor point, but I think sexual fluidity remains under-addressed by these polls. Some people are, for all intents and purposes, identifying as LGBT during, say, their college years, but then go on to settle down with an opposite-sex spouse. If the person once identified as LGBT, but doesn't today, is it based on what they "actively" are? Or if you ever once identified as LGBT, for purposes of polling, you remain in that category for life?
      - meruru 7y ago
        Not a minor point at all. I think sexual fluidity is one of the most relevant aspects of sexuality and I would love to see it measured. Labels like "Gay" and "Bi" are way too simplistic.
        fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
        The medical terminology is better, its often "Men who have sex with men" or something similar that removes the need to understand the subjects mental state and simply focus on the important clinical data.
        meruru 7y ago
        That's better, but doesn't separate men who have sex with manly men from those who only have sex with traps. It also excludes those who don't have sex at all for one reason or another.
      - masonic 7y ago
        sexual fluidity Based on your context, "sexual preference fluidity" would be the appropriate term.
        meruru 7y ago
        What's the ambiguity here? For self-identity matters we already have the expression "gender fluidity".
        masonic 7y ago
        Because sexual preference and gender identity are completely different things.
        meruru 7y ago
        Yes, I've addressed that in my comment. I was wondering if there was some third aspect I wasn't considering.
  - notJim 7y ago
    It's risen by 1 percentage point since 2012 when they started tracking this, and for millennials, the number is around 8.2%. They don't seem to have data for zoomers yet. [1] This would suggest (imo) that 4.5% is in fact a significant underestimate, but I don't know necessarily that it's as far off as 20% [1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population-rises.aspx?g_source=link_newsv9&g_campaign=item_259571&g_medium=copy https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population...
    - brandmeyer 7y ago
      Its also important to remember that as humans we tend to vastly over-estimate the incidence of relatively rare things. We tend to think that something happens based on how often we encounter it, without considering the total number of encounters. 4.5% is about 1 in 22. 8.2% is 1 in 12. Even accounting for the fact that most LGBT people are as private about their sexuality as straight people are, its often enough that you're likely to encounter LGBT people on a frequent basis.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  > the 4.5% number feels low to me (as in, impossibly so). I think it's contextual to location. A lot of LGBT people move to cities for acceptance. If you live in a big city, you're more liking to know relatively more LGBT people than if you lived in a rural or suburban area.
  - drawnwren 7y ago
    Age is also huge. It's easy to forget that half of the population is over 38.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Well are younger people and women more likely to know which of their friends are LGBT Studies about various social things plus first-hand experience lead me to say "probably."
- djdidf 7y ago
  If your an urbanite you have a huge observational bias simply if you accept that rural homosexuals are more likely to migrate to the city. Reason for the migration include less discrimination, but also higher concentration (making hooking up easier). Therefore your perceived rate of homosexuality would be grater. For what it’s worth the self reported rate of 5 percent is the same when I first cared to look it up, about 15 years ago. I would imagine that, if the self reported rate had significant error with it, the decreasing stigma would have changed it
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    I dislike to come across as overly sensitive, but I dislike how clinical sounding "homosexual" is. Just say gay people or LGBT. It isn't a condition. The DSM was wrong for a long period of time.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      LGBT doesn't mean homosexual. Gay doesn't mean homosexual. Homosexual means LG. Scientific terms are not value judgements. Don't worry about how you come across, worry about how you are.
      - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
        To be fair, I think it can be difficult to appreciate how it sounds if you aren't LGBT. If you're straight, you haven't been exposed to being demoralized because of your sexual orientation. I understand the perfectly valid scientific use of it-- I'm just saying that sometimes people weaponize it. When you come across anti-gay rhetoric, it almost never uses the word 'gay'. It has phrases like "the homosexual agenda". The wording is specifically chosen to imply the group is lesser than others.
        parineum 7y ago
        The preferred word of the ingroup will become the insult from the outgroup while the ingroup settles on a new term and round and round. You can't really expect the written word to use the current preferred term. The problem is never the words, it's the person behind them.
- mikedilger 7y ago
  The 30% figures others have mentioned seem high to me (as in, impossibly so). I left the US in 2005. My gay friends and many in the gay community in S.F. estimated amongst themselves at the time that about 10% of people were gay or lesbian, while the general public estimates were more like 4%. They estimated higher because they knew people who were not out of the closet. But even the gay community didn't think it so high as 30%. I gather that there is some kind of virtue signal "brownie points" thing going on in the US now (from what I read, I'm not there and perhaps I've been mislead, If I'm wrong I'm wrong, no offense intended) which makes people behave in ways designed to signal virtue to each other for social brownie points, and perhaps this is what is contributing to these high estimations. This new social norm disproportionally affects younger people and women.
  - dagw 7y ago
    The debate is really down to who 'counts' as gay. Kinsey (who really pioneered this work), for example, included everybody who had ever had a consensual same sex sexual encounter or who regularly had same sex fantasies, no matter how they self identified.
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codingslave 7y ago
If you look at pride month and the level of marketing and news associated with it, one would estimate that the gay population is huge. Nearly every major corporation on linkedin has a rainbow logo, my uber the other day showed their ride path as a rainbow. The level of influence that LGBTQ currently has in the American mind share far outsizes their population, even now I am worried my account will be banned for mentioning this. I have actually had many people from different walks of life mention this in the last month, people are taking note.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  Corporations are cashing in on the trend. I'm both equally happy and unhappy about it. It means that being LGBT has finally become mainstream enough, but it also shows a two-faced side to the corporations who will also donate to anti-LGBT politicians. It's pandering to us, is what it is. That part, I'm not so much a fan of.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Corporations are cashing in on the trend This is true. But it's also true that companies are afraid of being "corp-shamed" on the internet. No marketing or PR department wants to answer the question, "Why don't you support xyz!" on the internet. Steve Jobs didn't have a Reality Distortion Field half as powerful as Twitter.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
      I don't have any issue with companies taking no stand, so long as they don't have negative impact on the LGBT community through political contributions. Do people genuinely _expect_ Apple, et. al. to proactively support LGBT rights? I think it's asking a bit much, but also, I'm no marketing expert. I get that people want to associate with brands that they feel can 'get them'. And brands can freely choose what they identify with. But this is just marketers getting you to buy, it isn't a real political stance. So I would say to the person who exclaims, "Why doesn't <corporation X> support <cause>?", is largely ineffective. You got a bunch of social media icons to be rainbow-colored, and no actual legislative agenda for your issue, on behalf of these companies. Can we consider that progress? To me "Support LGBT rights <or else>" does not sound like progress.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
How can we be certain the "actual" U.S. Gay population is 4.5% of the population? We know not everyone who is LGBT is out or identifies on these surveys. Sure, there's undeniably a large cap between ~20% and 4.5%. But it's kind of meaningless to say what the absolute difference is, if we can't be certain how many remain closeted.
- prepend 7y ago
  It’s not meaningless as it’s important to plan for populations based on size. From a health perspective, there are programs targeting helping gay populations and allocating funds accurately is important so the most people are helped. There are many practical reasons for know demographics. There are limitations and it’s probably difficult to know the exact percentage, but we still need to know as accurately as possible.
mynameishere 7y ago
The media skews everything. Almost every TV show has a homosexual character, a black computer programmer, and an ass-kicking female martial arts expert. Hollywood has to parade its ideals, after all. And to some extent, it's showing you how urban sophisticates view their own world, amplifying the same skew. I remember some really old poll from a NYC high school (decades ago) in which the students estimated the Jewish population of the US at 50 percent, and the black population of the US at 50 percent. Because that was very close to the surrounding neighborhood's actual demographics. Even math like to stay local.
- Geimfari 7y ago
  I would actually be interested in seeing a crude analysis of this, because I don't know if there is a skew or if we just tend to notice the things that break our expectations. There are a few recent shows where a gay character is a part of the core ensemble, but I'm not sure gay characters are overall more than 1 out of every 30.
  - djdidf 7y ago
    Few shows have casts in the 30s. It’s almost unheard of. What modern show doesn’t have a gay character within its main cast?
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  Certainly 18% of TV characters aren't creationist, or addicted to painkillers.
  - djdidf 7y ago
    I guess your affirming the OPs point.
- vinay427 7y ago
  I'm not sure what ideals "Hollywood" is parading. You'd have a hard time finding a non-stereotypical character played by someone of one of various minority ethnicities, for example.
wool_gather 7y ago
Okay, now have them estimate the proportion of, say: Muslims, people who can't walk, two-parent households, and retired military. Are these any more accurate?
rolltiide 7y ago
the most useful thing that article points out is that there isnt a clear way to count LGBT populations, as these are all different things. There are also other groups of people wishing to be included in non-cisgender and non-hetero movements. It means the cisgender and heterosexual population is greatly overestimated but simply easy to conform to.
modeless 7y ago
These people were asked to choose between 6 options. Every number in every option was higher than the true value. Is it any wonder people overestimate when primed this way? I wonder how many other poll results people rely on are this obviously biased. Edit: I now believe this is incorrect, see below.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  This is a really excellent observation, because it doesn't even have anything to do with the definitions of the terms of the survey, simply its format.
- drawnwren 7y ago
  Eh, it's clear priming didn't have too much of an effect here. The single most selected answer in every year was >25%. Respondents thought the number was too low to begin with.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - abathur 7y ago
    There are a lot of sources of sloppiness here, though. The question is sloppy relative to the definitions. They asked "Just your best guess, what percent of Americans today would you say are gay or lesbian?", but the measuring stick is what portion of people identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. I would be a little surprised if people use exactly the same framework to decide if someone else is gay as they use to decide if they want to personally identify as gay. There's no I-have-no-clue choice. If you assume some fraction of all respondents are just guessing, and they know they're guessing based on a 100% scale, it would make some sense for the results to skew towards a choice given 75% of the scale. Young people give estimates that are significantly higher, but a cursory search (not sure about the veracity) suggests that LGBT self-reports also sort very strongly by age (https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/visualization/lgbt-stats/?topic=LGBT#demographic https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/visualization/lgbt-st...). As far as I can tell, the survey Gallup is using (on identification) doesn't provide an age breakout. I don't want to be too hyperbolic, but the change in the acceptability of identifying as LGBT over the last 70 years is pretty profound, and it seems at least plausible from the data that much of the difference in age groups (and, for that matter, partisan affiliation) could disappear if controlled for different identification rates among people's actual peer groups. If so, the headline is more like, "Most Americans assume everyone in America is a bit more like their peers than they are." This feels a little bit like asking one set of people "How many Americans have ever cheated on a test?" and asking another set "Have you ever cheated on a test?" and then publishing an article about how "Americans Greatly Overestimate How Many Americans Have Cheated on a Test"
reaperducer 7y ago
People also overestimate the amount of crime in America, the divorce rate, and how much money YouTube "celebrities" make. Perception is driven by exposure. Both are driven by media.
- stankypickle 7y ago
  The old adage: "TV will rot your brain" seems more true the older I get. Probably needs to be updated to include spending too much time on the internet.
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mxcrossb 7y ago
Something is weird about this poll. They are talking about the average person thinking it’s 20%, which is already crazy, but the most picked answer was 25% or more. What would the average have been if Gallup had allowed people to pick higher values?
fukkenFaggots 7y ago
One in ten. That's it.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  I'm now kind of curious if Hacker News has a policy on usernames (with respect to the standards applied to comments).
  - gus_massa 7y ago
    In somewhat similar cases, if the mods see it or if someone sends an email to the mods, the account got banned. hn@ycombinator.com
    - beastlyDykes 7y ago
      @webkike
  - dang 7y ago
    We ban accounts that have trollish usernames. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20username%20troll https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
Is this just not classic recency bias? Many TV shows feature a gay couple/character, and gay marriage was in the national news for years. People are shown examples through media constantly, and therefore think it's more prevalent than it really is. This applies to almost all issues too, plane accidents being one of the more obvious ones (plane travel is many times safer than car travel, and yet many people don't see it that way). Thinking Fast and Slow is a great book that covers at length recency bias and its affects [1]. Quite eye opening to me was one study where people were asked to spin a wheel with 1-100, and then asked how many African nations are in the UN. The number on the wheel had a profound affect on the number people picked [2], despite the fact that the number on the wheel should clearly has no meaning. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555 https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp... [2] https://www.realclearscience.com/lists/10_problems_with_how_humans_think/anchoring.html https://www.realclearscience.com/lists/10_problems_with_how_...
Geimfari 7y ago
This can also be explained by the fact that humans are terrible at estimating percentages. I would assume we'd see similar result for other questions. "3% of the population" sounds ridiculously low, but if you interact with 30 people each day you're likely to meet someone in that small category.
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narrator 7y ago
I don't mind gays or lesbians. I do wonder where all this stuff comes from if it's such a small part of the population though. The transexual population is even smaller. How exactly does a bill become a law in the context of some cause is now the next civil rights crusade? It's not like these people have big enough numbers to get their interests on the agenda as a genuine democratic interest group that a politician would care about strongly.
- povertyworld 7y ago
  Politicians need wedge issues that won't upset corporate donors.
- mikeash 7y ago
  What "this stuff"? How does a small group get politicians to pass laws to help them? It's pretty simple: some people care about people who aren't them. I'm pretty plain vanilla as far as my orientation and family life goes, but I would never vote for a politician who advocated for any position other than full equality for LGBTQ folks.
- romwell 7y ago
  >It's not like these people have big enough numbers 4.5% of 301 million is about 13.5 million - and that's just people who would self-identify as LGBT in spite of it still being a problematic thing to admit to (we even have a word for it: coming out). Elections are decided by much, much, much smaller numbers than that. (In comparison: that's more than the entire population of Pennsylvania). PS: I certainly would be uncomfortable identifying as a Jew in an environment where people merely "don't mind all the jews and hebrews, but do wonder what's up with all the stuff". Just put in that framework to see what's wrong with your question.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
The LGBTQ community seems to be especially visible online. If you spend a lot of time online, it's possible to have your perception skewed for that reason. You also have to consider that different people define these things differently. Some people will self identify as bisexual based solely on feeling attracted to other people, having no actual experience. Meanwhile, there are people who feel that you have to actually have (substantial) sexual experience with both genders to qualify for the label. I've seen advocates say things like "You don't have to give your sexual history to prove you are bi." and I've seen people talk about feeling attracted to members of their own sex and realizing they are actually bi, but don't yet have experience with members of their own sex because of taboos. So you can potentially have two different people look at the exact same data and draw different conclusions concerning who qualifies for what label. Different cultures also have different baseline concepts concerning sexuality. Some cultural differences will not be readily captured by the questions used in a survey, especially if they don't take the time to clearly delineate their terms.
dahart 7y ago
> Americans' estimate of the proportion of gay people in the U.S. is more than five times Gallup's more encompassing 2017 estimate that 4.5% of Americans are LGBT, based on respondents' self-identification as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. I would have guess it was around 10%, because I’ve read that number from several sources before, so 4.5% is a surprise. Today I also learned that the 10% number I’d read has been pretty controversial in the past. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/10-per-cent-population-gay-alfred-kinsey-statistics https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/10-per-cent-... Looking at Wikipedia’s article, higher numbers among youth globally seem to be a common trend. I would expect it’s not the population changing, but the stigma being shed. I wonder if it will take a few more decades before the numbers stabilize enough to be trustworthy... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orien...
- devoply 7y ago
  Or that youth is experimenting before they decide one way or another.
0xdeadfa65 7y ago
The cynical part of me says this is done intentionally for politically posturing.
baccheion 7y ago
8.55% of males on OkCupid indicated they weren't straight. 28.95% of ESFJ males said they weren't straight. If normed to the general population (given personality type frequency), 15.7% of males are not straight.
BorRagnarok 7y ago
That must be because of the over promotion of LGBT then. Also look at this: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/24/lgbtq-acceptance-millennials-decline-glaad-survey/1503758001/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/24/lgbtq-a... "Young people are growing less tolerant of LGBTQ individuals, ... , a survey released Monday shows." Because the promotion and attention seeking is everywhere, people think it's everywhere. That's why we're starting to see it backfiring now. And, lots of parents just don't want that message broadcasted to their kids all the time, at least not until they're a certain age. Parents realize the whole 'having a weewee doesn't make you a boy' story can be extremely harmful to young children. And so they teach their children to ignore those influences when they encounter them. That starts to reflect now in polls and attitudes. I bet on the LGBT community to start fighting even harder for tolerance again though, because the activists (who do all the speaking) seem to be quite incapable of self reflection and self examination.
- 0815test 7y ago
  Yes, it's interesting that the overestimate seems to be occurring on both sides. If more people realized just how small the whole LGBTQQetc. minority is, attitudes around these issues would be a lot more relaxed.
  - colemickens 7y ago
    How does the percentage of LGBT folks change whether I should have equal rights? How does the percentage of LGBT folks change whether I could be fired because my boss hates gay people? "more relaxed"? What does that even mean? What is uptight exactly?
    - 0815test 7y ago
      > How does the percentage of LGBT folks change whether I should have equal rights? I'm not making this argument at all, but apparently some people are; they seem to be saying that we should be extremely careful not to underestimate LGBT percentages, or they might be mistakenly regarded as "too small" of a minority to have legitimate "rights". Which strikes me as deeply weird, given that this whole range of notions of "rights", "agency" and so on and so forth are meant to apply to the individual first and foremost; who is, by definition, the smallest and most vulnerable - and, all too often, the most heavily oppressed minority of them all!
Grue3 7y ago
Alternative headline: Gallup greatly underestimates US Gay Population.
- djdidf 7y ago
  Sure, but you better have research to back it up. Gallup has theirs. Honestly I don’t know why 5% is controversial. It’s one in twenty. 25% would be one in four. Do you really know one in four homosexuals unless you live in, say, San Fran?
  - Grue3 7y ago
    Well, sexuality is a spectrum. The exact number of gay people depends on what is defined as a cut-off. It seems reasonable to me that at least 1 in 4 people wouldn't be 100% straight.
- stankypickle 7y ago
  Doubtful: "Thus, Gallup's methodology is not the only way to estimate the percentage of the population that is gay or lesbian. Still, all available estimates of the actual gay and lesbian population in the U.S. are far lower than what the public estimates, and no measurement procedure has produced any figures suggesting that more than one out of five Americans are gay or lesbian."
hansdieter1337 7y ago
How did they come up with the selection of these bins? Looks like one of these studies that are designed with a result in mind.
luord 7y ago
This... Makes perfect sense. And it's really odd that the population would increase instead of decreasing, for obvious reasons. Whatever the case, there must be something wrong with millennials and younger, but I'd bet it's more likely to be overreporting instead of underreporting.

91 points by rajnathani 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Is it possible that what you're seeing in this data is less about inaccuracy and more about how comfortably out people are? It says the estimates skew greater for younger people and women responding. Well are younger people and women more likely to know which of their friends are LGBT, because of a host of societal reasons that tend to influence men or older folks to wall off their feelings and communicate less about such things? I'm just saying, having lived in more than a dozen locations in five states and a Canadian province for the past several decades, the 4.5% number feels low to me (as in, impossibly so).

m0th87 7y ago
4.5% self-report as LGBT. That's an important distinction to make, and I too would be surprised if it's accurate.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  Also, the "what's your estimate" question specifies "gay or lesbian", whereas the self-identity question apparently includes the B and T. Obviously this would make the high estimate for just "gay or lesbian" even further off, but it still doesn't say anything good about the article's conclusion.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    Maybe a minor point, but I think sexual fluidity remains under-addressed by these polls. Some people are, for all intents and purposes, identifying as LGBT during, say, their college years, but then go on to settle down with an opposite-sex spouse. If the person once identified as LGBT, but doesn't today, is it based on what they "actively" are? Or if you ever once identified as LGBT, for purposes of polling, you remain in that category for life?
    - meruru 7y ago
      Not a minor point at all. I think sexual fluidity is one of the most relevant aspects of sexuality and I would love to see it measured. Labels like "Gay" and "Bi" are way too simplistic.
      - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
        The medical terminology is better, its often "Men who have sex with men" or something similar that removes the need to understand the subjects mental state and simply focus on the important clinical data.
        meruru 7y ago
        That's better, but doesn't separate men who have sex with manly men from those who only have sex with traps. It also excludes those who don't have sex at all for one reason or another.
    - masonic 7y ago
      sexual fluidity Based on your context, "sexual preference fluidity" would be the appropriate term.
      - meruru 7y ago
        What's the ambiguity here? For self-identity matters we already have the expression "gender fluidity".
        masonic 7y ago
        Because sexual preference and gender identity are completely different things.
        meruru 7y ago
        Yes, I've addressed that in my comment. I was wondering if there was some third aspect I wasn't considering.
- notJim 7y ago
  It's risen by 1 percentage point since 2012 when they started tracking this, and for millennials, the number is around 8.2%. They don't seem to have data for zoomers yet. [1] This would suggest (imo) that 4.5% is in fact a significant underestimate, but I don't know necessarily that it's as far off as 20% [1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population-rises.aspx?g_source=link_newsv9&g_campaign=item_259571&g_medium=copy https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population...
  - brandmeyer 7y ago
    Its also important to remember that as humans we tend to vastly over-estimate the incidence of relatively rare things. We tend to think that something happens based on how often we encounter it, without considering the total number of encounters. 4.5% is about 1 in 22. 8.2% is 1 in 12. Even accounting for the fact that most LGBT people are as private about their sexuality as straight people are, its often enough that you're likely to encounter LGBT people on a frequent basis.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
> the 4.5% number feels low to me (as in, impossibly so). I think it's contextual to location. A lot of LGBT people move to cities for acceptance. If you live in a big city, you're more liking to know relatively more LGBT people than if you lived in a rural or suburban area.
- drawnwren 7y ago
  Age is also huge. It's easy to forget that half of the population is over 38.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Well are younger people and women more likely to know which of their friends are LGBT Studies about various social things plus first-hand experience lead me to say "probably."
djdidf 7y ago
If your an urbanite you have a huge observational bias simply if you accept that rural homosexuals are more likely to migrate to the city. Reason for the migration include less discrimination, but also higher concentration (making hooking up easier). Therefore your perceived rate of homosexuality would be grater. For what it’s worth the self reported rate of 5 percent is the same when I first cared to look it up, about 15 years ago. I would imagine that, if the self reported rate had significant error with it, the decreasing stigma would have changed it
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  I dislike to come across as overly sensitive, but I dislike how clinical sounding "homosexual" is. Just say gay people or LGBT. It isn't a condition. The DSM was wrong for a long period of time.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    LGBT doesn't mean homosexual. Gay doesn't mean homosexual. Homosexual means LG. Scientific terms are not value judgements. Don't worry about how you come across, worry about how you are.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
      To be fair, I think it can be difficult to appreciate how it sounds if you aren't LGBT. If you're straight, you haven't been exposed to being demoralized because of your sexual orientation. I understand the perfectly valid scientific use of it-- I'm just saying that sometimes people weaponize it. When you come across anti-gay rhetoric, it almost never uses the word 'gay'. It has phrases like "the homosexual agenda". The wording is specifically chosen to imply the group is lesser than others.
      - parineum 7y ago
        The preferred word of the ingroup will become the insult from the outgroup while the ingroup settles on a new term and round and round. You can't really expect the written word to use the current preferred term. The problem is never the words, it's the person behind them.
mikedilger 7y ago
The 30% figures others have mentioned seem high to me (as in, impossibly so). I left the US in 2005. My gay friends and many in the gay community in S.F. estimated amongst themselves at the time that about 10% of people were gay or lesbian, while the general public estimates were more like 4%. They estimated higher because they knew people who were not out of the closet. But even the gay community didn't think it so high as 30%. I gather that there is some kind of virtue signal "brownie points" thing going on in the US now (from what I read, I'm not there and perhaps I've been mislead, If I'm wrong I'm wrong, no offense intended) which makes people behave in ways designed to signal virtue to each other for social brownie points, and perhaps this is what is contributing to these high estimations. This new social norm disproportionally affects younger people and women.
- dagw 7y ago
  The debate is really down to who 'counts' as gay. Kinsey (who really pioneered this work), for example, included everybody who had ever had a consensual same sex sexual encounter or who regularly had same sex fantasies, no matter how they self identified.

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codingslave 7y ago

If you look at pride month and the level of marketing and news associated with it, one would estimate that the gay population is huge. Nearly every major corporation on linkedin has a rainbow logo, my uber the other day showed their ride path as a rainbow. The level of influence that LGBTQ currently has in the American mind share far outsizes their population, even now I am worried my account will be banned for mentioning this. I have actually had many people from different walks of life mention this in the last month, people are taking note.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
Corporations are cashing in on the trend. I'm both equally happy and unhappy about it. It means that being LGBT has finally become mainstream enough, but it also shows a two-faced side to the corporations who will also donate to anti-LGBT politicians. It's pandering to us, is what it is. That part, I'm not so much a fan of.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Corporations are cashing in on the trend This is true. But it's also true that companies are afraid of being "corp-shamed" on the internet. No marketing or PR department wants to answer the question, "Why don't you support xyz!" on the internet. Steve Jobs didn't have a Reality Distortion Field half as powerful as Twitter.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    I don't have any issue with companies taking no stand, so long as they don't have negative impact on the LGBT community through political contributions. Do people genuinely _expect_ Apple, et. al. to proactively support LGBT rights? I think it's asking a bit much, but also, I'm no marketing expert. I get that people want to associate with brands that they feel can 'get them'. And brands can freely choose what they identify with. But this is just marketers getting you to buy, it isn't a real political stance. So I would say to the person who exclaims, "Why doesn't <corporation X> support <cause>?", is largely ineffective. You got a bunch of social media icons to be rainbow-colored, and no actual legislative agenda for your issue, on behalf of these companies. Can we consider that progress? To me "Support LGBT rights <or else>" does not sound like progress.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

How can we be certain the "actual" U.S. Gay population is 4.5% of the population? We know not everyone who is LGBT is out or identifies on these surveys. Sure, there's undeniably a large cap between ~20% and 4.5%. But it's kind of meaningless to say what the absolute difference is, if we can't be certain how many remain closeted.

prepend 7y ago
It’s not meaningless as it’s important to plan for populations based on size. From a health perspective, there are programs targeting helping gay populations and allocating funds accurately is important so the most people are helped. There are many practical reasons for know demographics. There are limitations and it’s probably difficult to know the exact percentage, but we still need to know as accurately as possible.

mynameishere 7y ago

The media skews everything. Almost every TV show has a homosexual character, a black computer programmer, and an ass-kicking female martial arts expert. Hollywood has to parade its ideals, after all. And to some extent, it's showing you how urban sophisticates view their own world, amplifying the same skew. I remember some really old poll from a NYC high school (decades ago) in which the students estimated the Jewish population of the US at 50 percent, and the black population of the US at 50 percent. Because that was very close to the surrounding neighborhood's actual demographics. Even math like to stay local.

Geimfari 7y ago
I would actually be interested in seeing a crude analysis of this, because I don't know if there is a skew or if we just tend to notice the things that break our expectations. There are a few recent shows where a gay character is a part of the core ensemble, but I'm not sure gay characters are overall more than 1 out of every 30.
- djdidf 7y ago
  Few shows have casts in the 30s. It’s almost unheard of. What modern show doesn’t have a gay character within its main cast?
alexandercrohde 7y ago
Certainly 18% of TV characters aren't creationist, or addicted to painkillers.
- djdidf 7y ago
  I guess your affirming the OPs point.
vinay427 7y ago
I'm not sure what ideals "Hollywood" is parading. You'd have a hard time finding a non-stereotypical character played by someone of one of various minority ethnicities, for example.

wool_gather 7y ago

Okay, now have them estimate the proportion of, say: Muslims, people who can't walk, two-parent households, and retired military. Are these any more accurate?

rolltiide 7y ago

the most useful thing that article points out is that there isnt a clear way to count LGBT populations, as these are all different things. There are also other groups of people wishing to be included in non-cisgender and non-hetero movements. It means the cisgender and heterosexual population is greatly overestimated but simply easy to conform to.

modeless 7y ago

These people were asked to choose between 6 options. Every number in every option was higher than the true value. Is it any wonder people overestimate when primed this way? I wonder how many other poll results people rely on are this obviously biased. Edit: I now believe this is incorrect, see below.

wool_gather 7y ago
This is a really excellent observation, because it doesn't even have anything to do with the definitions of the terms of the survey, simply its format.
drawnwren 7y ago
Eh, it's clear priming didn't have too much of an effect here. The single most selected answer in every year was >25%. Respondents thought the number was too low to begin with.
- deleted 7y ago
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- abathur 7y ago
  There are a lot of sources of sloppiness here, though. The question is sloppy relative to the definitions. They asked "Just your best guess, what percent of Americans today would you say are gay or lesbian?", but the measuring stick is what portion of people identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. I would be a little surprised if people use exactly the same framework to decide if someone else is gay as they use to decide if they want to personally identify as gay. There's no I-have-no-clue choice. If you assume some fraction of all respondents are just guessing, and they know they're guessing based on a 100% scale, it would make some sense for the results to skew towards a choice given 75% of the scale. Young people give estimates that are significantly higher, but a cursory search (not sure about the veracity) suggests that LGBT self-reports also sort very strongly by age (https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/visualization/lgbt-stats/?topic=LGBT#demographic https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/visualization/lgbt-st...). As far as I can tell, the survey Gallup is using (on identification) doesn't provide an age breakout. I don't want to be too hyperbolic, but the change in the acceptability of identifying as LGBT over the last 70 years is pretty profound, and it seems at least plausible from the data that much of the difference in age groups (and, for that matter, partisan affiliation) could disappear if controlled for different identification rates among people's actual peer groups. If so, the headline is more like, "Most Americans assume everyone in America is a bit more like their peers than they are." This feels a little bit like asking one set of people "How many Americans have ever cheated on a test?" and asking another set "Have you ever cheated on a test?" and then publishing an article about how "Americans Greatly Overestimate How Many Americans Have Cheated on a Test"

reaperducer 7y ago

People also overestimate the amount of crime in America, the divorce rate, and how much money YouTube "celebrities" make. Perception is driven by exposure. Both are driven by media.

stankypickle 7y ago
The old adage: "TV will rot your brain" seems more true the older I get. Probably needs to be updated to include spending too much time on the internet.

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mxcrossb 7y ago

Something is weird about this poll. They are talking about the average person thinking it’s 20%, which is already crazy, but the most picked answer was 25% or more. What would the average have been if Gallup had allowed people to pick higher values?

fukkenFaggots 7y ago

One in ten. That's it.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
I'm now kind of curious if Hacker News has a policy on usernames (with respect to the standards applied to comments).
- gus_massa 7y ago
  In somewhat similar cases, if the mods see it or if someone sends an email to the mods, the account got banned. hn@ycombinator.com
  - beastlyDykes 7y ago
    @webkike
- dang 7y ago
  We ban accounts that have trollish usernames. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20username%20troll https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

ApolloFortyNine 7y ago

Is this just not classic recency bias? Many TV shows feature a gay couple/character, and gay marriage was in the national news for years. People are shown examples through media constantly, and therefore think it's more prevalent than it really is. This applies to almost all issues too, plane accidents being one of the more obvious ones (plane travel is many times safer than car travel, and yet many people don't see it that way). Thinking Fast and Slow is a great book that covers at length recency bias and its affects [1]. Quite eye opening to me was one study where people were asked to spin a wheel with 1-100, and then asked how many African nations are in the UN. The number on the wheel had a profound affect on the number people picked [2], despite the fact that the number on the wheel should clearly has no meaning. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555 https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp... [2] https://www.realclearscience.com/lists/10_problems_with_how_humans_think/anchoring.html https://www.realclearscience.com/lists/10_problems_with_how_...

Geimfari 7y ago

This can also be explained by the fact that humans are terrible at estimating percentages. I would assume we'd see similar result for other questions. "3% of the population" sounds ridiculously low, but if you interact with 30 people each day you're likely to meet someone in that small category.

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narrator 7y ago

I don't mind gays or lesbians. I do wonder where all this stuff comes from if it's such a small part of the population though. The transexual population is even smaller. How exactly does a bill become a law in the context of some cause is now the next civil rights crusade? It's not like these people have big enough numbers to get their interests on the agenda as a genuine democratic interest group that a politician would care about strongly.

povertyworld 7y ago
Politicians need wedge issues that won't upset corporate donors.
mikeash 7y ago
What "this stuff"? How does a small group get politicians to pass laws to help them? It's pretty simple: some people care about people who aren't them. I'm pretty plain vanilla as far as my orientation and family life goes, but I would never vote for a politician who advocated for any position other than full equality for LGBTQ folks.
romwell 7y ago
>It's not like these people have big enough numbers 4.5% of 301 million is about 13.5 million - and that's just people who would self-identify as LGBT in spite of it still being a problematic thing to admit to (we even have a word for it: coming out). Elections are decided by much, much, much smaller numbers than that. (In comparison: that's more than the entire population of Pennsylvania). PS: I certainly would be uncomfortable identifying as a Jew in an environment where people merely "don't mind all the jews and hebrews, but do wonder what's up with all the stuff". Just put in that framework to see what's wrong with your question.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

The LGBTQ community seems to be especially visible online. If you spend a lot of time online, it's possible to have your perception skewed for that reason. You also have to consider that different people define these things differently. Some people will self identify as bisexual based solely on feeling attracted to other people, having no actual experience. Meanwhile, there are people who feel that you have to actually have (substantial) sexual experience with both genders to qualify for the label. I've seen advocates say things like "You don't have to give your sexual history to prove you are bi." and I've seen people talk about feeling attracted to members of their own sex and realizing they are actually bi, but don't yet have experience with members of their own sex because of taboos. So you can potentially have two different people look at the exact same data and draw different conclusions concerning who qualifies for what label. Different cultures also have different baseline concepts concerning sexuality. Some cultural differences will not be readily captured by the questions used in a survey, especially if they don't take the time to clearly delineate their terms.

dahart 7y ago

> Americans' estimate of the proportion of gay people in the U.S. is more than five times Gallup's more encompassing 2017 estimate that 4.5% of Americans are LGBT, based on respondents' self-identification as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. I would have guess it was around 10%, because I’ve read that number from several sources before, so 4.5% is a surprise. Today I also learned that the 10% number I’d read has been pretty controversial in the past. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/10-per-cent-population-gay-alfred-kinsey-statistics https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/10-per-cent-... Looking at Wikipedia’s article, higher numbers among youth globally seem to be a common trend. I would expect it’s not the population changing, but the stigma being shed. I wonder if it will take a few more decades before the numbers stabilize enough to be trustworthy... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orien...

devoply 7y ago
Or that youth is experimenting before they decide one way or another.

0xdeadfa65 7y ago

The cynical part of me says this is done intentionally for politically posturing.

baccheion 7y ago

8.55% of males on OkCupid indicated they weren't straight. 28.95% of ESFJ males said they weren't straight. If normed to the general population (given personality type frequency), 15.7% of males are not straight.

BorRagnarok 7y ago

That must be because of the over promotion of LGBT then. Also look at this: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/24/lgbtq-acceptance-millennials-decline-glaad-survey/1503758001/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/24/lgbtq-a... "Young people are growing less tolerant of LGBTQ individuals, ... , a survey released Monday shows." Because the promotion and attention seeking is everywhere, people think it's everywhere. That's why we're starting to see it backfiring now. And, lots of parents just don't want that message broadcasted to their kids all the time, at least not until they're a certain age. Parents realize the whole 'having a weewee doesn't make you a boy' story can be extremely harmful to young children. And so they teach their children to ignore those influences when they encounter them. That starts to reflect now in polls and attitudes. I bet on the LGBT community to start fighting even harder for tolerance again though, because the activists (who do all the speaking) seem to be quite incapable of self reflection and self examination.

0815test 7y ago
Yes, it's interesting that the overestimate seems to be occurring on both sides. If more people realized just how small the whole LGBTQQetc. minority is, attitudes around these issues would be a lot more relaxed.
- colemickens 7y ago
  How does the percentage of LGBT folks change whether I should have equal rights? How does the percentage of LGBT folks change whether I could be fired because my boss hates gay people? "more relaxed"? What does that even mean? What is uptight exactly?
  - 0815test 7y ago
    > How does the percentage of LGBT folks change whether I should have equal rights? I'm not making this argument at all, but apparently some people are; they seem to be saying that we should be extremely careful not to underestimate LGBT percentages, or they might be mistakenly regarded as "too small" of a minority to have legitimate "rights". Which strikes me as deeply weird, given that this whole range of notions of "rights", "agency" and so on and so forth are meant to apply to the individual first and foremost; who is, by definition, the smallest and most vulnerable - and, all too often, the most heavily oppressed minority of them all!

Grue3 7y ago

Alternative headline: Gallup greatly underestimates US Gay Population.

djdidf 7y ago
Sure, but you better have research to back it up. Gallup has theirs. Honestly I don’t know why 5% is controversial. It’s one in twenty. 25% would be one in four. Do you really know one in four homosexuals unless you live in, say, San Fran?
- Grue3 7y ago
  Well, sexuality is a spectrum. The exact number of gay people depends on what is defined as a cut-off. It seems reasonable to me that at least 1 in 4 people wouldn't be 100% straight.
stankypickle 7y ago
Doubtful: "Thus, Gallup's methodology is not the only way to estimate the percentage of the population that is gay or lesbian. Still, all available estimates of the actual gay and lesbian population in the U.S. are far lower than what the public estimates, and no measurement procedure has produced any figures suggesting that more than one out of five Americans are gay or lesbian."

hansdieter1337 7y ago

How did they come up with the selection of these bins? Looks like one of these studies that are designed with a result in mind.

luord 7y ago

This... Makes perfect sense. And it's really odd that the population would increase instead of decreasing, for obvious reasons. Whatever the case, there must be something wrong with millennials and younger, but I'd bet it's more likely to be overreporting instead of underreporting.