Suprising data from USA Today on Gay Lesbian population

Suprising data from USA Today on Gay Lesbian Population

The prestigious study (released in March by the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for  Disease Control and Prevention) discovered a much smaller number of "gays, lesbians and homosexuals"  than generally reported by the news media. While pop-culture frequently cites the figure of one in 10 (based  on 60-year-old, widely discredited conclusions from pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey) the new study  finds only 1.4% of the population identifying with same-sex orientation. Moreover, even among those who describe themselves as homosexual or bisexual (a grand total of 3.7% of  the 18-44 age group), overwhelming majorities (81%) say they've experienced sex with partners of the  opposite gender. Among those who call themselves heterosexual, on the other hand, only a tiny minority (6%)  ever engaged in physical intimacy of any kind with a member of the same sex These figure indicate that 94%  of those living heterosexual lives felt no physical attraction to members of the same sex, but the great bulk of  self-identified homosexuals and bisexuals feel enough intimate interest in the opposite gender to engage in  erotic contact at some stage in their development. A one-way street In fact, numbers show huge majorities of those who "ever had same sex sexual contact" do not identify  long-term as gay. Among women 18-44, for instance, 12.5% report some form of same sex contact at  some point in their lives, but among the older segment of that group (35-44), only 0.7% identify as  homosexual and 1.1% as bisexual. In other words, for the minority who may have experimented with gay relationships at some juncture in their  lives, well over 80% explicitly renounced homosexual (or even bisexual) self-identification by age of 35. For  the clear majority of males (as well as women) who report gay encounters, homosexual activity appears to  represent a passing phase, or even a fleeting episode, rather than an unshakable, genetically pre-determined  orientation. The once popular phrase "sexual preference" has been indignantly replaced with the term "sexual orientation"  because political correctness now insists there is no factor of willfulness or volition in the development of erotic  identity. This may well be the case for the 94% of males and 87% of females (ages 18-44) who have never  experienced same-sex contact of any kind and may never have questioned their unwavering straight  outlook — an outlook deemed "normal" in an earlier age.  ‘Let go’ of one in 10 For the less than 2% of men and women who see themselves as gay, however, the issue of sexual orientation  remains vastly more complicated. Within a month of the release of the CDC/NCHS report, one of the world's most respected think tanks on gay life confirmed some of its most surprising findings, without specifically  referencing the recent government study. UCLA's Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public  Policy offered a new estimate of homosexual identification: concluding that 1.7% of Americans say they're gay, and a slightly larger group (1.8%) identified as bisexual — by definition attracted to both genders and shaping their  sexual behavior through some mixture of inclination and preference.