Doug PollardGays v Christians - Statistics & Lies
June 19th 2008 00:06
The Rudd government is moving more cautiously on gay rights than most of us would like, while the Liberal Party is also stepping on the brake with its Senate enquiry into same-sex pensions blocking progress till the end of September.
Both sides appear to be pandering to self-styled "Christians", although Pharisees might be a more accurate description. But why does the "Christian" lobby have such an influence over the major political parties when it comes to GLBTI rights? The answer lies in the statistics they use. And statistics can lie.
We don’t know what Australian Christian Lobby chairman Jim Wallace (no relation to the US Jim Wallace) says to politicians in private, but speaking on the ABC’s Lateline recently, he claimed that gay relationships only last on average 18 months; and that only two per cent of same-sex relationships are monogamous.
As anyone who has studied statistics knows, a survey is only valid if the sample it uses is representative of the whole population being studied. The sample in this case consisted of young gay men under 30 years of age living in Amsterdam; and was taken from a Dutch study into HIV transmission, published in the official journal of the International AIDS Society.
Two per cent of these men had a ‘steady’ partner only; the rest had both a ‘steady’ partner as well as casual sexual partners. These ‘steady’ relationships lasted on average 18 months. A relationship was deemed to be ‘steady’ if the respondent said it was.
In other words, the statistics tell us quite a bit about a certain group of young gay men living in one of the acknowledged gay capitals of Europe, famous for its tolerance and sexual licence, but nothing about anyone else.
The survey did not include older gay men, lesbians of any age, married same-sex couples, or any gays and lesbians anywhere else in the world except Amsterdam. In other words, the sample tells us nothing about gays and lesbians in general.
In that same Lateline interview, Wallace claimed that only two per cent of the population are gay and lesbian. Leaving aside the question of whether the actual number matters – after all, we bend all kinds of laws for other minorities, especially religious minorities – is he right?
The first problem is how one defines sexual orientation. Are you gay if you feel sexual attraction to a member of the same sex, or only if you act on that attraction? How often must you feel the attraction and/or act on it to qualify?
A 1970 German survey found that 18 per cent of young men aged 16 - 17 reported same-sex experience, but the figure dropped to two per cent when the survey was repeated in 1990. It seems the term 'gay' may itself be responsible.
“Ever since homosexuality has become publicly argued to be an innate sexual orientation, boys’ fear of being seen as gay has, if anything, increased,” said the survey’s director, Volkmar Sigusch.
So, problematically, people may not want to admit being gay, even if they are.
Closer to home, a 2001/2 Australian telephone survey found that 97.4 per cent of men and 97.7 per cent of women identified as straight.
But in the same survey, 8.6 per cent of men and 15.1 per cent of women said they were either attracted to their own sex, or had some same-sex experience. And half the men, and two thirds of the women with same-sex experience, identified as straight.
Such men are usually referred to as MSM - men who have sex with men - or, colloquially, "on the down low." These men form the bulk of those who get noticed cruising for sex in public places - most fully fledged 'gay' men don't need such places.
Younger orientation-diverse young men and women tend not to like the word or even the concept of 'gay', and instead identify as 'queer'. Surveys tend to miss these two groups.
There’s also the problem of how you define a same-sex experience. Some men insist they aren't gay if they are always the insertive partner, or if they restrict their encounters to mutual masturbation,for example.
And then there’s the way you ask the questions.
In 1992, the US-based Alan Guttmacher Institute reported only one per cent of men were exclusively gay; but that survey was conducted by researchers going door to door, mainly in suburban areas, conducting face-to-face interviews!
Wherever he got his figures from, Jim Wallace’s two per cent claim represents, at best, only those people who were a) included in the survey in the first place, b) who thought of themselves as gay, and c) were willing to admit the fact to the researcher.
If you really want to diss gays and lesbians, and finessing relatively benign statistics doesn’t meet your needs, there are also plenty of dodgy statistics out there for anti-gay activists to pick up. Often they’re drawn from ‘studies’ conducted by two American campaigners: Dr James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute (although nowadays such sources often go unacknowledged).
Between them, these two "Christian" proselytisers produced reams of propaganda with only a tenuous connection to the truth throughout the 1980s and 1990s; propaganda which nevertheless gained them many headlines, and led to claims e.g. that gays are more likely to molest children, be serial killers, have horrible diseases and so on.
Both ‘researchers’ have been now been exposed and thoroughly discredited by mainstream scientists, many of whom have publicly complained of their own work being distorted to fit Dobson and Cameron’s agendas.
To take one of the most famous examples, beloved of anti-gay campaigners, Cameron ‘proved’ that gays and lesbians have much shorter lifespans than straights.
Fewer than two per cent of gay men survive middle age, he said; the median age of death for lesbians is 45; gay men are 116 times more likely than heterosexuals to be murdered, and 24 times more likely to kill themselves.
As a result many anti-gay websites speak of the terrible consequences of ‘choosing a gay lifestyle’.
Cameron got his figures by comparing obituaries in gay and straight newspapers – hardly an accurate source for the entire community. Gays and lesbians living outside the gay ghetto and dying of natural causes are unlikely to get an obituary in the gay press!
In short, nothing published by Cameron or Dobson can be relied upon. So are there any statistics we can rely on?
Sadly, no. The only thing that can be said with any confidence is that there are many more people who have had - and continue to have - multiple same-sex experiences than people who are willing to call themselves gay or lesbian.
But unless we are accurately counted in national statistics, we will never have adequate resources earmarked for our needs. As Gay & Lesbian Health Victoria notes on its website: “one of the current challenges [for GLBTI health] is that questions on sexual orientation and gender identity are not yet included in routine demographics of most major national research and census data collection.”
Accurate statistics – not those quoted by the Australian Christian Lobby – would enable government to define the costs and benefits of same-sex relationship recognition, gay adoption and parenting, and a host of other social policies.
So, exactly how many of us are there?
Looking at some 30 surveys from across the world, the estimates run from one to two per cent, to as high as 14-15 per cent, depending on how you define gay, and who and how you ask.
In 2005 the British Treasury and Department of Trade was asked to help the government gauge the impact of the Civil Partnerships Act. They came up with a figure that estimated gays and lesbians as making up six per cent of the population. In the absence of any similar effort by our government, that’s probably as near the truth as makes no difference. And a lot closer than Mr Wallace’s efforts.
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