How many of us are there?

How many gay men live in the United States, you wonder? Read on...

Historical estimates have ranged from 2 percent to 10 percent. Ten is what most activists lock onto, it's the number that pops up in my head.

Notoriously, men are not so forthcoming about their homosexual attraction.  With that in mind, how on earth are we supposed to get any data?  However, someone tried to pull information off of facebook and google and created this essay published recently in the New York Times. 

Here is a little map he created as well, indicating the states that are most "closeted".  His stats indicate that men are More likely to "come out" in a state that is more tolerant of gays.        

Multimedia

Where the Closet Is Still Common

Rhoade Island is the most tolerant, Mississippi the least. Orange and orangish, less so, purple and purplish more so. Click onto the article and then the map to see detail. Here is a snippet of the article:
      

"Using surveys, social networks, pornographic searches and dating sites, I recently studied evidence on the number of gay men. The data used in this analysis is available in highly aggregated form only and can be downloaded from publicly accessible sites. While none of these data sources are ideal, they combine to tell a consistent story."

      

"At least 5 percent of American men, I estimate, are predominantly attracted to men, and millions of gay men still live, to some degree, in the closet. Gay men are half as likely as straight men to acknowledge their sexuality on social networks. More than one quarter of gay men hide their sexuality from anonymous surveys. The evidence also suggests that a large number of gay men are married to women." against homosexuality remains strong, many more gay men are in the closet than are out."

      

"How deep in the closet are these men? Obviously, it is possible for a gay man not to acknowledge his sexuality to Facebook or surveys but to still have healthy, open same-sex relationships."

I read his article and had a few moments where I looked at things differently.  The take-away for me was this: "There is, in other words, a huge amount of secret suffering in the United States that can be directly attributed to intolerance of homosexuality."

Interesting, isn't it? "There is a huge amount of secret suffering in the United States that can be directly attributed to intolerance..."