It can take a long time for people who are gay to admit their sexuality to themselves, especially if they are brought up in a dogmatic religious family or community.
There are many people who have admitted to themselves they are gay, but who do not feel confident enough to disclose this fact to other people. There are still plenty of people around who are less than accepting and open-minded.
When people do develop the confidence to tell other people they are gay, they will of course start by telling someone they trust: maybe a family member of a close friend. A stranger asking an intrusive question about one's sexuality is going to be very far down the pecking order.
Even those people who have "come out" to some trusted people may well not feel comfortable about coming out to a complete stranger for the purposes of a survey. Even if the interviewer is very unlikely to express any negative judgment, the fact remains that this interviewer is an individual who could be homophobic, and this is a factor that could easily determine the response to the question.
It is also the case that many people would not want their sexual orientation to be logged on a form kept in the Nanny State Archives, where there might be any way of connecting the form to themselves at some later date.
But in a nutshell, is it really so surprising that only 1.5% admitted to being gay or lesbian to a complete stranger as part of a telephone or face-to-face poll? Let's face it: it belongs to a completely different category of question than an enquiry as to what kind of washing-up liquid people use.
In 1982, being gay or lesbian was far more stigmatised than it is today. There is no comparison today with how things were thirty years ago. In that year, I became President of Oxford University Gay Society, as it was then called. We were (I believe) the largest university gay society in the country, and I recall there being 130 members when I stood down. If I recall correctly, there were about 13,000 students at Oxford University at that time, which meant that, even then, when the vast majority of gay people stayed closeted during their university days, and would not have braved attending GaySoc where they might have been spotted by someone from college, 1% of Oxford students self-identified as gay. So membership was already at 1% at a time thirty years ago, when the vast majority of lesbian and gay people lacked the confidence to attend GaySoc. This makes a mockery of the claim only 1.5% of the population being gay, lesbian or bisexual.
Having been involved in LGBT politics for the past thirty years, my impression is that 5 to 10 % of the population is gay or lesbian, and a further (significant) percentage - I would suggest 10 to 20%, or higher - is bisexual.
By the way, a minority group's human rights and right to social equality do not diminish depending on the size of that group. That is the mentality of the playground bully. But the inaccuracy and absurdly unscientific nature of this survey does need to be exposed, because anti-gay religionists and their secular allies have for years been trying to make LGBT people as invisible as possible, and pouncing on any half-baked pseudo-evidence that supports their prejudices.
© Gary
Powell, 2013
