While homosexuals claim they make up 10% of the population, the reality is closer to 1-2%.
Homosexual activist groups have finally admitted that their claim that 10% of the population is "gay" is false. This admission took place in a Friend of the Court brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on March 26, 2003 in the Lawrence v. Texas, known as the Texas sodomy case. In this case, homosexuals are trying to have the Texas law against sodomy declared unconstitutional by the Court.
In footnote 42 on page 16 of this legal brief, 31 homosexual and pro-homosexual groups admitted the following: "The most widely accepted study of sexual practices in the United States is the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS). The NHSLS found that 2.8% of the male, and 1.4% of the female, population identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. See Laumann, et al, The Social Organization of Sex: Sexual Practices in the United States (1994). This amounts to nearly 4 million openly gay men and 2 million women who identify as lesbian."
Despite this indirect admission that the 10% figure homosexuals have used for more than two decades is wrong, the writers of the brief still continue to lie about the real numbers. The claim that 4 million men and 2 million women are gay is based on multiplying the 2.8% and 1.4% figures by the total number of males and females in the U.S. It is unreasonable to count any of the 60 million Americans who are 14 or younger (including 40 million who are under nine years of age) as "openly gay men and women." Yet, that is what this brief claims. Even as homosexuals admit they're wrong about the 10% figure, they apparently still can't resist lying about their true numbers in our population.
Reputable journalists, legislators, and other opinion leaders must avoid using this bogus 10% statistic.Those who continue to use this homosexual urban legend should be challenged to prove it with facts-not myths. |
The NHSLS study found that only 0.9% of men and 0.4% of women reported having only same-sexual partners since age 18, a figure that would represent a total of only 1.4 million Americans as homosexual.
The truth is that homosexuals used the bogus 10% figure in order to inflate their numbers and their influence. The 10% Urban Legend has been effectively used by homosexuals to recruit children into the homosexual lifestyle and to lobby for legislation to provide special legal protections for homosexuals. Homosexual groups throughout the United States, however, continue to use this bogus 10% figure because it provides them with political power and legitimacy.
Debunking The Urban Legend
What do scientific surveys and studies show about how many homosexuals actually exist? As long ago as the early 1990s, statistics showed that the 10% was false.
USA Today, in its April 15, 1993 issue published the following statistics from a Planned Parenthood/Alan Guttmacher Institute study:
- Only 2.3% of males ages 20 to 39 said they had experienced a same-sex relationship in the past decade. Only 1.1% said they were exclusively gay.
- A 1989 U.S. survey indicated that no more than 6% of adults had any kind of same-sex experience. Less than 1% said they were exclusively gay.
- A 1992 French study found that only 1.4% of men and 0.4% of women said they had any same-sex contact in the past five years.
- In 1991, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) provided data indicating that of the 6% who have ever experienced same-sex relations, the number of currently active homosexuals (at that time) was .06-0.7%. The source for this is: T.W. Smith, Planning Perspectives 23, May/June 1991).
The Wall Street Journal shed more light on the 10% urban legend in its March 31, 1993 issue:
- A survey conducted by the Minnesota Adolescent Health Survey (1986-86) of public school students indicated that only 0.6% of boys and 0.2% of girls identified themselves "mostly or 100% homosexual"-which is less than one percent!
- In Canada, a 1988 survey of first-year college students under 25 indicated that 98% were heterosexual; 1% bisexual; and 1% homosexual. (Source: King, et al. Canada, Youth and AIDS Study, Kingston, Ontario: Queen's University.)
Census Figures Show Few Homosexual Households
The 10% figure was drawn from Alfred Kinsey's deliberately dishonest research on human sexuality conducted in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even Kinsey never declared that 10% of the population claimed to be exclusively homosexual. |
The Census 2000 figures show that homosexuals exist in far fewer numbers in our population than homosexual activists would have us believe. Homosexuals used these census figures to claim that the number of same-sex households had experienced an explosive growth during the past ten years. This is untrue. According to Census 2000 figures, there are a total of 106,741,426 households in the U.S., only 00.42% of those are unmarried same-sex households. This is less than one percent. Yet activists claimed that these figures showed a surge in same-sex households since 1990. However, the Census Bureau issued a disclaimer saying that 1990 figures and 2000 figures could not be reconciled because of the different ways the questions were asked in 2000. TVC's report, Lies, Homosexuals, and Census Statistics provides more details about this. It is posted on the TVC web site.
Dr. Mark A. Yarhouse and Dr. Stanton L. Jones have dealt with the 10% urban legend in their book, Homosexuality: The Use of Scientific Research in the Church's Moral Debate. They note that the 10% figure originated in the flawed research work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kinsey's work has been criticized not only for his use of pedophiles to molest children, but his statements about the prevalence of homosexuality in our culture have also been misquoted and distorted. While homosexuals still claim that 10% of the population figure is homosexual, Kinsey never made that claim. According to Yarhouse and Jones, Kinsey actually reported a number of different statistics on prevalence rates. These rates include the following:
- Ten percent of white males were "more or less" exclusively homosexual during at least a three-year period between the ages of 16 and 55.
- Fifty percent of males had neither attraction to nor the experience of homosexual behavior.
- Kinsey also reported that homosexuality among women was about half the rate of males.
The Kinsey statistics as a whole are suspect because he didn't use random samples and drew samples from prison populations and others who self-identified as homosexuals.
Gay Activist Admits The 10% Figure Is Bogus
Bruce Voeller, a gay activist has admitted in his book, Some Uses and Abuses of the Kinsey Scale that the 10% figure was a myth used to promote the homosexual agenda. According To Voeller: ...after years of our educating those who inform the public and make its laws, that concept that 10 percent of the population is gay has become generally accepted as "fact." ... As with so many pieces of knowledge and myth, repeated telling it made it so…
