Family Life

04.08.11 | Sarah Harnisch

 A new study shows only 3.5 percent of the American population is gay. A California demographer put the figure at about 4 million adults. That's much lower then the 5-million person estimate that's been taken as fact for nearly 2 decades, based on other isolated smaller studies. An Associated Press Article finds it's also a fraction of the figure put out by Alfred Kinsey, who said in the 1940's that 10-percent of the men he surveyed were "predominantly homosexual." Gary Gates has advised the Census Bureau. He's a demographer-in-residence at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He says he derived his results from five studies that asked subjects about their sexual orientations. For more info on the study, go here.