What are the Demographic Characteristics of the LGB Population?

Abstract

Numbers are invested with considerable importance in western culture. Not only do we have a fascination for those things that can be counted, but numbers offer tangible reassurance about what is known. For LGB populations, numbers hold particular power because judgements about the relative size of the population have often been made to support or deny claims to the community’s significance. In the early 1950s, Kinsey and his colleagues (1948, 1953) shocked the US with findings that same-sex sexual behaviour was much more prevalent than had previously been thought (the books were also widely read in the UK). Kinsey et al.’s research was used (by others) to produce one of the most enduring ‘facts’ about LGB people: the statistic that they formed 1 in 10 of the population. The statistic had currency for almost two decades, but by the early 1990s, two large-scale studies had downgraded the LGB population to 1 in 50 (Wellings et al., 1994; Laumann et al., 1994). Both teams of researchers argued that their findings challenged previous calculations; in particular, Laumann et al. (1994) sought to debunk the 10 per cent myth. Their estimates of 3.6 per cent for men and 1.8 per cent for women shaped beliefs about the size of the population for the following decade. Some LGB researchers reacted angrily to these calculations: one argued that the sample of lesbians achieved in Wellings et al. (1994) was smaller than her own circle of friends and acquaintances (Stanley, 1995).