Recent national surveys of about 10,000 subjects conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control report less than 3% of men as saying they have had sex with another man "at some time since 1977, even one time ("AIDS Knowledge and Attitudes for January-March, 1990, Provisional Data From the National Health Interview Survey," Deborah Dawson; Joseph E. Fitti and Marcie Cynamon, op. cit. for April-June, 1990; Pamela F. Adams and Ann M. Hardy, op. cit. for July-September, 1990, in Advance Data, #s 193,195,198, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, p. 11 in all three documents).
The September 2, 1992, Dallas Morning Times (pg. 4C) reported on a "University of Chicago study aimed to be the most significant study [on American sexuality] since Mr. Kinsey's" and a related study by the National Opinion Research Center. The findings:
"...An estimated 3 percent of the population claimed at least one act of homosexual sex during 1991. Over the respondents' lifetime, 4.5 percent claim some such sex... The final conclusions from the University of Chicago's study may confirm a figure far lower than Mr. Kinsey's. They may also show that American sexual behavior is quite conservative. The mean number of sexual partners over an individual's lifetime is probably around six or seven" ("Study of U.S. sex habits may contain surprises").
Science magazine, July 3, 1992, reports a very recent French study that found only 4.1% of men and 2.6% of women said they'd had homosexual intercourse at least once in their lives. Only 1.1% of men and 0.3% of women said they'd had homosexual intercourse in the past 12 months (as reported in "Homosexual figures grossly exaggerated," AFA Journal, September, 1992, pg. 9).
"The London Daily Mail released last week what it calls `the most exhaustive survey ever conducted into British sexual habits.' The most stunning finding was that only 1.1 percent of British men said they were active homosexuals, a figure similar to the most recent American polls" (World magazine, Jan. 29, 1994, p. 9).
Gay activists repeat the 10% figure with broken-record frequency because they know it is key to their efforts to advancing their political agenda. Activist Bruce Voeller said in a recent book:
"I campaigned with Gay groups and in the media across the country for the Kinsey-based [10%] finding that `We are everywhere.' This slogan became a National Gay Task Force leitmotif. And the issues derived from the implications of the Kinsey data became key parts of the national political, educational and legislative programs during my years at New York's Gay Activist Alliance and the National Gay Task Force. And after years of our educating those who inform the public and make its laws, the concept that 10 percent of the population is gay has become generally accepted `fact.' While some reminding always seems necessary, the 10 percent figure is regularly utilized by scholars, by the press, and in government statistics. As with so many pieces of knowledge and myth, repeated telling made it so -- incredible as the notion was to the world when the Kinsey group first put forth its data or decades later when the Gay Movement pressed that data into public consciousness" ("Some Uses and Abuses of the Kinsey Scale," Bruce Voeller, Homosexuality, Heterosexuality: Concepts of Sexual Orientation, The Kinsey Institute Series, June Machover Reinisch, ed., Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 35, emphasis added).
In a recent article, The New American reported: "Ever since the Alfred Kinsey study, homosexual activists have been insisting that they represent about ten percent of the the total population. This notion, based on faulty science, has been generally accepted as fact by the popular culture.
Even Newsweek discovered this discrepancy in a recent issue, reporting that `ideology, not sound science, has perpetuated a 1-in-10 myth. In the nearly half century since Kinsey, no survey has come close to duplicating his findings,' Patrick Rogers wrote in the February 15th issue. `Most recent studies place gays and lesbians at somewhere between 1 and 6 percent of the population.' The story also reported that some homosexual activists now admit that they exploited the inflated Kinsey figures for political reasons. `We used that figure when most gay people were entirely hidden to try to create an impression of our numerousness,' says Tom Stoddard, former member of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund [a sort of gay ACLU]'" ("The Homosexual Numbers," March 22, 1993, p. 37).
An even more recent major national survey of male sexual behavior concluded that "Nearly one-fourth of American men under 40 have had 20 or more sexual partners during their lifetimes, and only 2 percent ever engaged in homosexual behavior..." A team of researchers from the Battelle Human Affairs Research Centers in Seattle published a series of reports on their study in the March-April [1993] issue of Family Planning Perspectives, the magazine of the Alan Guttmacher Institute.
"...Only 2.3 percent of the men reported any homosexual activity in the past 10 years, and just 1.1 percent said they had engaged in exclusively homosexual sex. That is far less than the 10 percent figure attributed to the landmark Kinsey report from 1948" ("Homosexual activity lower than believed, study shows," Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, April 15, 1993, p. A-13, emphasis added).
Time and Newsweek magazines, both in April 26, 1993 issues, reported on these sexual survey results released by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, scarcely a conservative bastion regarding sexual issues: "Of the [3,321 American] men surveyed, only 2.3 percent reported any homosexual contacts in the last 10 years, and only half of those -- or just over 1 percent of the total -- said they were exclusively gay in that period" (Newsweek, "Sex in the Snoring '90s," p. 55, emphasis added).
Time calls "The study, one of the most thorough reports on male sexual behavior ever," and comments: "...its scientific verdict (men are having too much unprotected sex) was overwhelmed by a political one. `It shows politicians they don't need to be worried about 1% of the population,' says conservative leader Phylls Schlafly... Some gay activists are concerned that she may actually be right. `Bill Clinton and Jesse Helms worry about 10% of the population,' says ACT UP co- founder Larry Kramer. `They don't worry about 1%. This will give Bill Clinton a chance to welch (sic) on promises'" (Time, "The Shrinking Ten Percent," p. 27).
Perhaps not coincidentally, in a little-publicized development, Indiana University, which has provided the great bulk of Kinsey Institute funding over the years, has announced it is cutting Kinsey funding almost in half. The July 12, 1993 Washington Times reported:
"The Kinsey Institute has fallen on hard times. Indiana University is halving the funding it provides the sex-research institute, located on the Bloomington campus. `We get about half our funding from the university,' Stephanie Sanders, Kinsey's interim director, said last week. `We received $522,490 from the university in fiscal 1992-93, but it's providing only $256,888 in fiscal 1993- 94.'
"The money woes come at a bad time. The Kinsey Institute already is:
*Facing credibility problems as a result of attacks on the methodology used by the late sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and his claims that homosexuals make up 10 percent of the population.
*Hearing criticisms and calls for a congressional inquiry into the lives of 317 boys who were the subject of `child sexuality' findings in Mr. Kinsey's 1948 book `Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.'
"... Eugene Eoyang, chairman of the institute's board of trustees, said the reduced funding will `cripple the sex-research center' and hamper efforts to hire a first-rate director. He called Indiana University's funding cutbacks a `good way to turn the institute into a dead letter office.' He said some institute staffers already have been transferred and others are slated to be laid off as a result of the cuts. Mr. Eoyang said he'd rather `dissolve the institute' than see it eroded" ("Mounting woes threaten future of Kinsey Institute," p. A1, A10).
leaderu.com |
