For all the homophobia that exists in the world, all the Bible-thumpers who claim that being gay is unnatural and against God’s will and all that, there sure are a lot of homosexuals in the world, both male and female. But just how many might shock you. Hint: it’s a lot more than you probably think.
The New York Times estimates that roughly 5% of American men are gay, while historical data puts the range between 2 and 10%. It’s a hard number to pin down considering the number of men who aren’t out and the inability to survey every single one living in the country. As reporter Seth Stephens-Davidowitz put it:
At least 5 percent of American men, I estimate, are predominantly attracted to men, and millions of gay men still live, to some degree, in the closet. Gay men are half as likely as straight men to acknowledge their sexuality on social networks. More than one quarter of gay men hide their sexuality from anonymous surveys. The evidence also suggests that a large number of gay men are married to women.
While things like Gallup polls, Facebook and the state census can help shed light on these numbers, it really is impossible to tell just how much of the population is gay. And, of course, this article only focused on homosexual men. When putting gay women, bisexuals and other queer cultures in the mix, that percentile of “alternative sexualities” goes way up – to at least nine million, according to a 2011 study by The Williams Institute.
Of course, there’s no real reason to even need this data other than to satisfy some innate curiosity or, perhaps, to prove to Conservatives how homosexuality and bisexuality are not only not sinful, they’re also not down to a few select deviants but are instead a large and thriving part of the population.