Thursday, 23 September 2010

How Many Gay Men Are There? Not That Many

You can read it as a pdf here.
Anyway, you want to know the figures, don't you?
Here they are...

Heterosexual/Straight 46,922 - 94.8%
Gay/Lesbian 481 - 1.0%
Bisexual 245 - 0.5%
Other 242 - 0.5%
Don't Know/Refusal 1,393 - 2.8%
No Response 233 - 0.5%

And twice as many women identified as bisexual as men did.
It's fascinating stuff but - of course - flawed.
This puts the percentage at between 2 and 4%.
Ask me how!


  1. How?
    Does it include the prison population (who are all at it)?

  2. But isn't there a difference between men who identify as gay, or even bisexual, and men who have sex with men?

    I can perhaps buy that only 2% of us are gay and out to ourselves, but speaking as someone who gives erotic massage to an unending queue of married men, I don't buy for five minutes that only 0.5% of us are bisexual.

  3. The survey was on how people self-identified - they were read the options and asked to choose one.
    I think you're right - lots more men have or would have sex with men than would consider themselves bisexual.
    Though I think gay men tend to exagerate the number of men who would...

  4. How do you work it out, then?

    I take the yearly Big Brother intake to be a reliable barometer of society's sexual mores.
    So that's anywhere between 60-80% what are gay.

    Either that or what I call the Jason Orange/Mark Feehily Ratio: 1 in 5.

    Fagburn's method can't be more scientifically accurate than that, surely???

  5. Tell us oh great one.