Americans Wildly Overestimate the Share of the Population That’s Gay
Asked if he had any gay friends, William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that, “If there are only 2.5 percent gays in America, I know them all.”
Buckley was kidding, but lots of Americans, it seems, have ended up with the same impression. Americans dramatically overestimate the gay and lesbian population, a recent Gallup poll suggests. The average American apparently thinks that more than one in five Americans is gay or lesbian when, according to Gallup, only 3.8 percent of Americans self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.
In fact, only 9 percent of Americans get it right, estimating that the gay population is less than 5 percent, while 33 percent of Americans think that gay people make up more than 25 percent of the population. Education doesn’t help much, either: The average guess among those with postgraduate schooling is still 15 percent.
It’s possible, as Gallup suggests, that this common misperception is due to the media’s emphasis on gay issues and the abundance of gay and lesbian characters in modern entertainment. There’s also gay Americans’ political and cultural prominence: At Buckley’s alma mater, Yale, the joke goes, “one in four, maybe more; one in two, maybe you.”
That isn’t the only source of confusion, though: Buckley was remarking on the revision of an assessment from sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey that had estimated one in ten Americans was homosexual.
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