Why do gays wildly over-estimate their proportion of homosexuals?
Wagon with poster "We're a GAY and HAPPY FAMILY" (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Why do people in the United States (and probably other Western countries , as well) over-estimate the proportion of gays and lesbians in the population? Ever since 1948, when the Kinsey Report suggested 1-in-10, Americans have accepted wildly exaggerated figures. Last year, The Smithsonian , the official web magazine of the famous museum in Washington DC, even suggested that it was 1-in-5! However, a recent government survey in the United Kingdom found that in 2013, 1.6% of UK adults identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual. This is a very small proportion of the population, but it becomes even smaller when the figures are broken up. Only 1.6% of men identified as gay; only 0.8% of women as lesbians; and 0.5% of men and women as bisexual. The percentages varied hugely by region. In London the figure for gay, lesbians or bisexual was 3.2% but in the North East region , it was only 1.