Newspaper Page Text
How Many Of Us Are There?
Part 2 of a 3-part Series
In Part 1 ofVarnell's series he discussed the results of a
1970 survey by the National Opinion Research Center
(NORC) which showed that perhaps only 3.3% of U.S.
males may be homo sexual.Calling NORC's survey a "badly
botched job", Varnell cites Kinsey's historic 1948 survey
which reflected that up to 50% of males who remain single
engage in homosexual behavior to some degree.
Do the inadequacies of the NORC survey then force us
back to depending on results from the 40-year-old Kinsey
studies? Yes and no.
Kinsey's data were certainly based on the largest group of
people whose behavior was ever carefully explored, and
Kinsey's small team of interviewers were far better at
doggedly luring and extracting information from their
respondents than any other researchers have ever been-or are
ever likely to be again.
On the other hand, Kinsey's data were admittedly not
based on a random sample of the population being, as they
were, derived from a subset more white, more midwestem,
and more college-educated than the nation as a while.
Additionally, today they cannot constitute a very reliable
index of the late 1980s after the advent of the pill,
decriminalized abortion, widespread decriminalization of
homosexuality, the rise of the gay and women's movements,
and the whole sexual revolution, such as it was.
More technical criticisms of Kinsey include the claim that
he too much relied on volunteers; but such critics forget how
persuasive Kinsey could be in getting people to "volunteer."
And the NORC study refusal rate lends it no greater
credence. Critics also claim that Kinsey "over-sampled"
■ some unrepresentative groups such as gays, or prisoners, or
college-age students. But it is possible to make approximate
corrections and Warded Pomeroy pointed out that the errors
in sampling gays, our focus here, "were only minor ones."
Such objections, however, tend to miss the point of
Kinsey's entire research program.
Kinsey started with the (essentially correct) assumption
that everything that people thought they "knew" about sex
should be held in doubt. Such beliefs came mostly from
pre-scientific era cultural and religious traditions, from
folklore, from normative legal and penal systems, or even
culturally-bound psychiatric and psychoanalytic systems.
Kinsey wanted to understand human sexuality in all its
enormous range and variety: thus he wanted to know what
actually was going on "out there." Part, but only part of
what he wanted to know was How Many, How Much, and
How Often. More important for him were questions such as
Why, How Does This Work, To What End, With What
Degree of Satisfaction, What Are the Techniques, and How
Does This Mesh With the Rest of the Person's Life. It was
his hope that at the end of something like 100,000
interviews he might actually have something like a genuine
sample, but he died in 1956, less than 20 percent of the way
to his goal, and his work was not continued. But the data he
did gather, collected in his two books, on the Male (1948)
and the Female (1953) have a great deal of enduring value.
Look at the statistic that 37 percent of all (white) men
had had at least one homosexual experience. Subsequent
analysis (removing the prison sample) makes a technical
correction of that number to 33 percent But as Warded
Pomeroy emphasized in his biography of Kinsey, the
number is not the important thing. Rather, "few people
would have believed, before our Report, that a third of
American males had had at least one homosexual
experience."
Another benchmark datum from Kinsey was the figure
that four percent of American (white) men had had only
homosexual experience. That number seems hard to shake
because it would not be affected by prisoners who did gay
sex only in prison, nor by the covering up of gay experience
by men who wished to emphasize their heterosexuality. For
what it is worth, in a mail-in survey questionnaire survey
conducted by Psychology Today, four percent of the
respondents reported that they were wholly gay-while
another four percent said they did gay sex "frequently."
Would gay men disproportionately read Psychology
Today and mail in a questionnaire? In 1970? We simply
do not know and speculation is useless.
Somewhere, then, between those baseline figures of 33
percent and four percent lies a whole variety of behaviors,
frequencies, and degrees of "commitment" by a wide
range of people at different times of life. When gay
activists claim, however, that 10 percent of the population
is (primarily? potentially? currently?) homosexual, they
are making a claim Kinsey never made-and that he
would have disapproved of.
-Paul Varnell
Paul Varnell is research director for the Illinois Gay
and Lesbian Task Force.
In our next issue Varnell looks at what conclusions can
and cannot be gleaned from Kinsey's research about
homosexual behavior.
TEMPLE OF
MY FAMILIAR
Published by
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
$19.95 Hardcover
by
ALICE
WALKER
Oxford Book Store has a limited
number of 1st and 2nd printing
editions of the national bestseller,
The Temple of My Familiar,
with bookplates personally autographed by Alice Walker.
If you wish to reserve a copy by phone, call 262-3333. Outside the metro Atlanta area
call 800-476-3311.
South's Largest Book Store
(ixforb iBook l^tore
262-3333
2345 Peachtree Road, N.E.
Peachtree Battle Shopping Center
Brenda L. Hawkins
ED. D„ Licensed
Psychologist
••• Counseling
•• Psychotherapy
••• Hypnosis
1518 Monroe Drive, Suite 600
Atlanta. GA 30324
By Appointment Only
(404) 872-9016
The Freshest Things
Going for Your Eyes...
SeeQuence Disposable
Contact Lenses & Lens
Care Products by
Bausch & Lomb
at:
CXDptical
Otores
2441 Cheshire Br. Rd.
636-9727 or 636-9811
Not tally * newsletter, but who's counting.
Typesetting
doesn't have
to strain your
budget or
your patience.
Just What
: You've Been
Looking For
| Hayslope Graphics
; offers quick service,
j tailored to your^
; needs,
__ be they
newsletter, resume,
flyer, or that book of
poetry you’ve been
thinking about for years.