Just how many gay people are there? The most commonly cited statistic is that 10 percent of any population is gay, lesbian, or bisexual. This number is taken from what are commonly referred to as the Kinsey Reports. Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist and sexologist who, along with a team of researchers, published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, in 1953. He and his team conducted two-hour interviews with more than eleven thousand people: 5,300 men and 5,940 women, from early teens to ninety, although most were between college age and middle age. The interview pool represented a diverse population with respect to class and religion. The participants were almost all white, although Kinsey believed that his previous research on African Americans bore out his findings in the Kinsey Reports. The study’s interviewees were asked about every possible combination of sexual behavior in which they had ever engaged: heterosexual, homosexual, masturbatory, voyeuristic, and even bestial. Interviewees were asked to detail sexual positions and fantasies, and whether they’d had sex before marriage or any extramarital affairs.
The 10 percent figure appears only once in relation to homosexuality in either report. Kinsey discovered that 10 percent of US males are “more or less exclusively homosexual” in their behavior for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five. (During that time, 8 percent were, in fact, exclusively homosexual, and among women, 2–6 percent were “more or less” exclusively homosexual.) For Kinsey and his team, homosexuality occurring over a three-year period indicated that it was a significant feature of that person’s sexual life. But the conclusion that 10 percent of the people in any given population are lesbian or gay is a serious misreading of Kinsey’s work.
To compound matters, Kinsey consistently argued against identifying people as having homosexual or heterosexual identities. He was interested in what people did, not in how they self-identified.
Why do gay people, and LGBT organizations, continually cite this 10 percent figure, ignoring Kinsey’s important cautions against conflating behaviors and identities? Gay people understandably want to feel that there are a lot of other people like them. But there is more to the history of how this number has been used. When Kinsey’s first study was published, the 10 percent figure, out of literally thousands and thousands of statistics in the book, was reported and recycled in the initial, and scandalized, press coverage. The disproportionate attention given homosexuality, analysis of which had comprised less than a tenth of the first book, is due to the fact that, suddenly, straight America was confronted with evidence that, in their midst, there were so many more people engaging in homosexual behavior than they had thought or feared. The sensationalized reporting contributed to the book’s huge sales and notoriety. It also lost Kinsey his government funding. Both Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female were best sellers, and together they have sold more than three-quarters of a million copies.
Before conducting his research, Kinsey suspected there was more homosexual behavior in the United States than anyone admitted. His progressive attitudes toward sexuality informed his desire to prove it. At the time of his studies, homosexual behavior was illegal in America. Kinsey hoped that by making an accurate assessment of the frequency of homosexual behavior, demonstrating that it was not isolated to a few individuals, his work would destigmatize homosexuality. He thought this might even lead to a change in laws.
The principal objective of Kinsey’s research was to discover the most accurate way to measure all human sexual behavior. This raises an important question. While it is possible, within limits, to measure homosexual behavior, is it possible to scientifically study what it means to be “gay”? Or is “gay” a political and social identity? Or, rather, a moral question? Can it be all of these? Kinsey turned to a scientific study of people’s sexual activity as a way to respond to, and potentially counter, American culture’s intense moralizing around sex. As he and his team wrote in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, because humans are so quick to categorize, we think that “[t]hings are either so, or they are not so. Sexual behavior is either normal or abnormal, socially acceptable or unacceptable, heterosexual or homosexual; and many persons do not want to believe that there are gradations in these matters from one to the other extreme.”1 This sounds very scientific; but if we, as a culture, admit to these gray areas, we may also stop thinking about sex in the context of black-and-white morality. Kinsey saw his objective science as a way of changing social views about sexuality and, with them, society itself. Returning to Kinsey’s studies today may help us rethink the complexity of human sexuality.
In his research, Kinsey measured both behavior and arousal so he would have a more complete picture of human sexuality. These two measurements gave a complex account of an individual’s sexual responses. He preferred to use the terms homosexual and heterosexual to describe sexual activities between persons, not the persons themselves. For Kinsey, the definition of homosexuality meant being sexual with, or aroused by, the same sex.
One of Kinsey’s most important findings was that most people, in behavior and arousal, fell somewhere in between completely homosexual or heterosexual. Kinsey concluded that only about 4 percent of men and 1–3 percent of women are exclusively homosexual in their attractions and/or behavior throughout their lives; 50 percent are exclusively heterosexual; and 46–48 percent are sexually active with and/or aroused by both sexes. This means that, although few people act exclusively homosexually, almost half of all people do have a homosexual experience or are aroused by the idea of one.
By demonstrating that there were as many people having homosexual experiences as heterosexual ones, Kinsey’s statistics normalized and de-moralized homosexuality. Moreover, because Kinsey’s studies were considered more scientific and comprehensive than any previous such research, they had a sizable impact on popular thought at the time. Many of his findings do hold up today. The results of the most recent comprehensive study of human sexuality, The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (2010), generally parallel Kinsey’s findings regarding homosexual behavior. Contemporary researchers into sexuality still consider the Kinsey Reports as providing the most nuanced existing data about homosexuality because of their use of in-depth interviews.
Although Kinsey was not interested in what caused particular sexual desires, he was interested in how context and circumstance could affect how a person came to desire someone of the same sex. He thus examined how factors such as age, education, regional location, and religion helped shape expressions of homosexuality. He discovered that religion might affect family gender dynamics and that education in a single-sex college offered opportunities for same-sex sociality. Why people desired someone of the same sex was a different question.
Kinsey’s data conclusively show that sexual preferences, behaviors, responses, and attractions can and often do vary across a person’s lifetime and circumstances. Almost all of his statistics are qualified by the age of the subject. For example, he found that 37 percent of males he interviewed had, at some point between adolescence and old age, reached orgasm with another male. He also found that 50 percent of men who held off marrying until the age of thirty-five had engaged in sex with another man to orgasm.
The statistics for women were strikingly different. The occurrence of homosexual responses in females was half as much as that in males. Homosexual contact to orgasm was one-third as much. Finally, a much smaller percentage of women continued their homosexuality for as many years as the men did. Only half to a third as many females were exclusively homosexual. Gender shaped the patterns of sexual life in other ways, too. Kinsey concluded that two females were more likely to remain in a steady relationship than two men, hypothesizing that the display of affection between women was more socially acceptable. This conclusion, though, might as easily, or better, be explained by the fact that women are socialized to be in long-term committed relationships. Kinsey also concluded that men who had sex with men had many more sexual partners than did women who had sex with women, because sexual promiscuity was highly valorized among men. These conclusions, accurate or not, are still held to be true today. The reality is that cultural assumptions shape how people express themselves sexually. Long-standing stereotypes around sexuality—such as ideas about who is promiscuous and who is monogamously faithful—are largely organized around presumed differences between men and women.
Some people invoke statistics to show that homosexuality is relatively rare. Others crunch numbers to demonstrate that more gay people exist, and have always existed, than is commonly acknowledged. But Kinsey’s data point to something far more radical. His findings show that very few people stably fit any one category. Sex and desire are complex. His findings hold implications for everyone, and that is why there continues to be so much resistance to his work. Many lesbians and gay men have not wanted to hear about individual sexual variance. They would rather, incorrectly, extrapolate the 10 percent number to all cultures and all periods in human history.
When so much of the present-day experience of gay and lesbian people tells them that they should not even exist, the desire to locate others like themselves in the past is understandable. Discovering that you and people like you have a history is a way to believe you have a future. All evidence points to the fact that people have experienced same-sex desire, and engaged in same-sex practices, across cultures and human history. What these practices and desires have meant and whether they have been praised or condemned have not been constant across time or place. This, too, is history, and it fits well with Kinsey’s own interest in finding out what people do, what they think about what they do, and how this is understood in relation to the prevailing social rules. By shedding light on the rich array of human sexual practices and imaginations, Kinsey’s research reveals different ways to be gay. It opens up different ways to consider what being gay means today as well as in the past.
Kinsey’s studies have also come in for a lot of appropriate criticism. Social scientists, both in his day and in ours, have criticized the composition of his studies. People have argued that the research did not track the same people over an extended amount of time and that the sample was not nationally representative. Others note the study may have unintentionally selected for interviewees more willing to share homosexual histories, because talking to Kinsey’s research teams was a rare chance to talk about “deviant” sex without being judged for it. Along this line, others argue that male prisoners were overrepresented in the sample, probably increasing the number of men reporting having had sex with other men. Kinsey also interviewed people who were already part of homosexual communities.
Culture and circumstance no doubt shaped Kinsey’s studies in very particular ways. But these factors always shape and transform the expression of sexuality itself. We cannot understand sexuality outside of them. For example, many more-recent studies have discovered a far higher occurrence of homosexual contacts between women than did Kinsey. Often these rates exceed that of male same-sex sexual behavior. Does this reversal reflect changes in cultural attitudes? Does it reveal the particular power dynamics at play in the Kinsey studies, where women were almost always interviewed by male researchers? Any one interviewee or study participant can lie—whether in the face-to-face interviews used by Kinsey and his team or in the anonymous questionnaires used in more-recent surveys. People often lie about sex or bend the truth to others and even to themselves. Psychological motivation and sense of self are always difficult to assess. If Kinsey had focused only on arousal, feelings, and other psychological responses, then ascertaining sexuality might have been always just out of reach. But if he had focused only on behavior, then he might seriously underreport, because he found that many people continued to fantasize about a variety of sexual acts that they rarely—if ever—engaged in.
Kinsey took all of this into consideration in developing the Kinsey Scale as a measure of a person’s sexuality. The scale is distinct from the majority of Kinsey’s statistics. It simultaneously takes into account both feelings of arousal and actual behavior that did and did not end in orgasm. It was developed to show that more people behaved sexually in various ways than a focus on orgasm or a sexual act would reveal. Among other things, the scale helps us get a picture of the many gradations in sexual life, such as instances where individuals may be sexually aroused by members of the same sex but never act on these desires. The scale ranges from 0 to 6: 0 means exclusively heterosexual, and 6, exclusively homosexual; the wide variety of people who behaved and fantasized bisexually existed somewhere in between.
Each number along the scale measures the balance of homosexual and heterosexual behavior and/or arousal in any one person’s sexual history. Someone who is a Kinsey 6, meaning exclusively homosexual, might never have acted on any same-sex desires. What makes this person a 6 is that he or she does not have any consciously avowed sexual feelings toward the “opposite sex.” Or, a person may be a 2 because he or she has, in fact, had a few homosexual experiences but still feels an overwhelming amount of desire for the “opposite sex.” As Kinsey and his team wrote, “It is only possible to determine how many persons belong, at any particular time, to each of the classifications on a heterosexual-homosexual scale.”2 In other words, the rating is a snapshot of a particular moment, and may or may not predict a person’s later behavior or self-identifications as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight.
If all sexuality is ultimately individual, and always circumstantial, can we ever make any general claims about homosexuality and LGB people—other than, it’s complicated? The problem is that, ever since the publication of the Kinsey Reports, both heterosexuals and homosexuals, and in particular gay and lesbian organizations, have tried to use Kinsey’s numbers to prove one point or another. It would be more useful to stop using the statistics for political purposes and, instead, use them as a resource for understanding what it means to be gay or bisexual or heterosexual. Sometimes, as when arguing for gay rights, it may prove useful and necessary to quote statistics and speak of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” as precise terms that describe clearly defined identities and groups. But we should not confuse political necessity with exploring and reveling in the richness, complexity, and sometimes downright confusions of sexual desire.
Ultimately, the point should not be to crunch numbers or explain who is gay or not gay, but to think about how people experience, negotiate, and live their desires as they move through the world. This shifting experience of desire is not going to produce such poster-ready lines as, “One Out of Ten People is Gay.” Understanding the wide variety of ways people live their desires will open more social space for all people—however they identify—to be a little more honest about what they do and what they want with one another.