Answered on Quora.
The 10% figure is one of the biggest lies out there, but everyone believes it. It is repeated by gay activists and the Gay Lobby like a mantra, but it is almost certainly not true. It is based on the Kinsey Study, but even the Kinsey Study did not find that 10% of the population were truly gay in the way a gay person is now.
Like anyone else, gay people would like to increase their numbers. I don’t blame them.
If I were gay, I would want as many hot men available to date as possible. The fact that 97% of males are not gay must be very depressing to gay men. I think it would make me not only depressed but confused. How could I tell which men were gay and which were not?
Gaydar is another lie of the Gay Lobby. The truth is it doesn’t even work. Gay men hit on straight men all the time thinking that we straight men are gay. Obviously their Gaydar is broken. So if Gaydar doesn’t work and is just a conceit, and you really can’t figure out if a man is gay or not, what is a gay man to do? I am thinking it must be Hellish. What infernal confusion!
The truth is that many population studies in the US consistently find that at the most 3% of the US population identifies themselves as gay. There may be some closet cases lying in the surveys, but I doubt if there are many. In some studies, half of those 3% are married to women! How is that compatible with these studies being flawed by mass hidden closet cases? They keep doing the surveys, and they keep coming up with at the most 3% of men are gay. So we have to use the 3% figure in talking about the gay percentage of the population.
Gay activists and their Lobby hate these low figures because they think there is strength in numbers. They think that if people think there are only a tiny number of gay men, people will be freer to bully and persecute them. Whereas if they are a large figure like 10%, people will accept them more. I am not sure if it is true. Maybe it is. But they’re still lying, even if they are lying for a good reason. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
I would like to differentiate between gay men in general and gay activists and the Gay Lobby. Quite a few gay men dislike the Lobby and the activists. I have a gay friend who despises both of them. He says gay men just need to get married, move to the suburbs in a nice house and live quietly and unobtrusively like the rest of their neighbors. I concur!
So please do not think that by attacking the activists and the Lobby I am attacking all gay men. Certainly not. In fact, I encourage gay men to reject both activism and the Lobby. They’re counterproductive, and ~80% of the things they say are flat out lies. Gay activism, like all the other Identity Politics, is just propaganda. As feminism is nothing but propaganda for women, gay activism is nothing but propaganda for gays.
Nevertheless, I encourage all gay men to fight for their basic rights. I just don’t think lying is the right way to get what’s due to them. Not only will I support them, but I will help them, as I participate in some worthy gay political campaigns!
Surveys done with medical students found that ~3–4% of men identify as gay, gay being 0–100 to 20–80 on a scale orientation where 0–100 = completely gay. Another 2% identify as gay-leaning bisexuals, these being 30–70 to 40–60 on the same scale. Only 1% of men identify as fully bisexual, showing the stereotype about few people being purely bisexual is based on fact.
Adding up the numbers, 6% of men in these surveys identify as leaning gay, either bisexual or fully gay. Keep in mind that 2% of those men have a pretty strong lean towards women too, so they are not that gay. Another 1% are the “pure bis” who cannot logically be seen as gay either, neither can they be seen as straight. These are the people most perfectly identified as bisexual.
So population surveys get 3%, and medical student surveys get 6%. I don’t know what to do. Let’s go by majority rules and take the population surveys and say that 3% of men are gay.
This figure tends to be pretty steady for whatever reason. My research leads me to believe that true biological homosexuality (which surely exists and is the case with most gay men) is caused by hormonal aberrations and abnormalities in the womb. I doubt if it is genetic. There is some pretty good evidence leading to this conclusion. For whatever reason, these hormonal aberrations seem to occur in only ~3% of male births, and at least in the last few decades, nothing changes that.
Adding weight to my theory, there is research out there that shows that after 1990 in the Czech Republic, great efforts were put into monitoring pregnant women, adjusting their hormonal levels to the proper level, and keeping them from going off. Incredibly, research showed that this effort caused the rates of homosexuality and transsexualism to plummet. Not collapse but plummet.
Therefore, there may indeed by a “cure” for male homosexuality or at least a way to prevent it. I assure you that the Gay Lobby does wish to do anything to prevent homosexuality and transsexualism even if the mother desires this. But this shows how we might be able to artificially lower or even raise the rate of male homosexuality.
Now since the rate seems to be at a steady rate of 3%, and all evidence seems to be that the 3% rate (or lower) is the norm all over the world for biological male homosexuality, I would say we have nothing to worry about gay men taking over the world, though some of the real radicals would love to do that, trust me. Go read some of their documents. But the vast majority of gay men reject this gay chauvinism or gay imperialism.
The rate is 3% now, and it will be 3% in the future, unless we start lowering it as above.
This is why the question does not make sense. If biological male homosexuality occurs at a steady low rate everywhere on Earth without change, the rate of such cannot go much higher than 3%, certainly not to 100%, and it will not go down zero either, at least naturally on its own.
On the other hand, straight men have a tremendous potential for bisexuality. There are societies currently and in the past where very high percentages of men (up to 95%) engaged in regular sex with men (while also having lots of sex with women) throughout their lives. So you can definitely end up with societies like Afghanistan where many straight (by sexual orientation) men engage in homosexual behavior.
We must distinguish between orientation and behavior. They tend to follow each other pretty well but not always. Ancient Greece and Rome are good examples of where they can diverge a lot.
Now if you want to ask what would happen if 100% of men were behaviorally bisexual and were engaging in sex with men on a regular basis as in Ancient Greece and Rome, that’s another question, and I don’t think you questioner is asking that here. Personally I think it would be utterly catastrophic, although gay men would think they were in Paradise. Then again, the sky has not fallen in Afghanistan, where something like this is already going on.
Male homosexuality is bad for society. It brings along a whole host of problems and yes, diseases, along with it which impose considerable cost on society. I would like to add that these problems impose these costs on gay men themselves in terms of mental and physical illness, a whole lot of very sketchy behavior, and a culture that does not seem to be healthy at all in many ways. Despite the societal effects, the overwhelming costs of these problems are born by gay men themselves.
Nevertheless, I feel that these are gay men’s problems. It is unspeakably rude and selfish to say that gay men’s problems which hurt them so much are terrible for the rest of us for whatever reason. It’s like someone walks into your house with a broken leg wanting help and you scream at him for ruining your day. How rude! How selfish!
Gay men’s problems are for them to solve. We need to stay out of it. If they want to deal with this stuff, let them go to it. We will help them, but the ball’s in their court.
I would like to point out that lots of things are not good for society, but we allow or tolerate them anyway, as it’s just not the place of society or the state to regulate people’s behavior, lifestyles, and choices.
In terms of the costs to society, yes there are some, especially in disease burden and medical expenses, but keep in mind that gay men are only 3% of the male population and a tiny 1.5% of the total population. Basically, whatever problems male homosexuality causes, we in the US can handle them very easily because gay men’s numbers are so small. If the percentages of gay men were to climb radically beyond 3%, the costs to society would be much more severe, and it would be something we could not deal with well. But that’s a whole other hypothetical problem.
As far as benefits go, I am going to be a radical here and say that society as a whole probably reaps exactly zero benefits from homosexuality either male or female. The effects on society are either negative or (mostly) neutral, but even when they are negative, their tiny numbers allow us to handle these effects well.
For the life of me, as a straight man, I cannot fathom any benefits from having gay men in my society. Somebody needs to clue me here. What’s in it for me, or for straight society as a whole? Color me confused!
Most straight men would probably be perfectly happy to never deal with another gay man for the rest of our lives. It’s not that they are horrible for us, but there’s no benefit at all, and there is a certain downside (they constantly try to seduce us). Most of us don’t really hate them at all (we are more indifferent towards them than anything else) but we don’t feel any special love for them, and I wager they would not be missed.
Nevertheless, despite this fact of there being no benefit to us, we straight men need to support full rights for biologically gay men. We need to wish for them the same happy and healthy lives as we do for ourselves, not even 1% less.
Please realize that these men did not choose to be this way. We straight men are straight only due to sheer luck and a roll of the genetic dice. Any of us could have ended up gay too. If you are straight, try to imagine if you had been wired up gay instead. Imagine yourself just as you are, except you are a gay man instead of a straight man. That’s called empathy. What would you like to the world to be like? This is the world that straight men need to create for gay men, not for any particular reason, but only because it’s simply the right thing to do.
No matter what we straight men think about male homosexuality (and a lot of us are profoundly repulsed by it), nevertheless at the end of the day, we have to be kind.
