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The numbers game

Wrat Wrangler contends that all of this is to support just 2.2 percent of the population, as if that number were written in stone.

The fact is, those percentages depend on how the research is done (most people won't answer honestly when the questions are about "forbidden" sex), and which answers make a person "gay." (Did you do it in the last year? Do it since puberty? Never done it with the opposite sex? Attracted to same sex but never acted on it?)

We don't have agreed-upon definitions for sexual orientation -- nor should we, because Kinsey was correct to depict it as a scale from zero (totally heterosexual) to six (totally homosexual). Kinsey's estimate of 10 percent is probably still the most accurate one if you count only those who are at 3 or above on the scale.

The University of Chicago Study that supposedly found 2.7 percent of men and 1.3 percent of women were gay was widely misrepresented because those percentages were only for people who had done it in the previous year, while 7.1 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively, had done it sometime after puberty.

A related question on the survey was, "Are you sexually attracted to people of the same gender?" When couched in terms of "attraction," 6.2 percent of men and 4.4 percent of women answered in the affirmative. Another study at Harvard found that 20 percent of the population has "homosexual impulses."

Many major cities and lots of smaller ones have their Gay Pride events on the same Sunday in June. More than 3 million gays plus a lot of straights turn out for just the major events. If Wrat Wrangler's number were correct, 3 out of every 5 gay people attend a Pride celebration on the same day every year. That's preposterous.

So don't quote those low numbers as if they were factual. Nobody knows the real number.