of homosexuality. Homophobia, the extreme manifestation of the aversion, is obviously reprehensible, but instead of trying to understand it the gay lobby attempts to eradicate it with the message that homophobia is mere denial. Once we all recognize our bisexuality, the argument claims, we will lose our irrational and sometimes violent prejudices, but the research suggests a much simpler reason for the straight’s aversion to the gay, and a reason which really is rooted in common sense.
The attraction of gay to gay, or of lesbian to lesbian, is natural. The gay or lesbian is attracted to members of the same sex. The gay does not want sex with women, nor does the lesbian want sex with men. There is a corollary. A heterosexual male is attracted to a heterosexual female. He does not want sex with men. That too is normal.
It is a consequence that gays (or lesbians) may cruise on a crash course. Gays are naturally attracted to those of the same sex, which means they are attracted to men in general. A problem arises in that the majority of men are not sexually attracted to gays nor, indeed, to any other men. Again, that is natural. What to the normal gay is natural and desirable is to most men unnatural and they recoil from it. No one accuses a woman of a ‘phobia’ if she repels an unwanted sexual advance, yet men are apparently phobic if they dislike being ‘checked out’ by a gay. The intolerance of straights is not of gays as such, but rather of the assumption by gays that others are like, or have the capacity to be like, themselves. The conventional male can be unsettled by those who are not plainly heterosexual. The thought of a homosexual act is unenjoyable to him in the obvious sense that it is not what he enjoys. Nor does he feel mere indifference towards it: it troubles him. The gay man desires what he finds undesirable and so the gay advance is unwelcome. It is a foray across conventional boundaries, an invasion of the Eros and private space that is part of the self, and it is seen as gay harassment. Any gay reviewing the results of the studies might decide that the best way to reduce society’s antipathy towards homosexuality is for the gay to be more aware of the heterosexual’s need for a private space; in other words, to practice more restraint.
‘What I don’t understand,’ Anne asks, ‘is why you men are so rude about gays, calling them bloody shirt-lifters, fairies, queers.’
‘We can call them much worse than that,’ Bill says.
‘But why? They aren’t a threat to you. They’re not competing.’
‘Perhaps it’s because what they desire of us,’ Bill says, ‘is abhorrent to us. I can’t stand the idea of having sex with another man.’
‘You fear it?’
‘What’s to fear? I might as well be frightened of becoming a vegetarian.’
‘No chance of that!’
‘I suspect most men shun gays,’ Bill says, ‘and maybe even despise them, because they don’t compete in the great male race.’
‘In which women are the prizes?’
‘Thank God, yes.’
‘But why be repelled by homosexuals? Surely what they do with each other is their own business, and they have the right to privacy.’
‘Privacy, yes, but I don’t want them anywhere near my private space. My private space is you and I, and I don’t want a third person in there telling me that with a little gender-bending I could enjoy lifting his shirt.’
‘Bill!’
‘Do what they want – unto themselves – but to camp on my ground is to test the limits of tolerance.’
To tolerate something is to put up with what you do not like and gays, of course, want more than toleration: they want acceptance, and believe that the rest of us must give that acceptance. They think we will do so more easily once we recognize that we are all gay – or at least, that all of us are bisexual and so have the capacity for gayness within us. But are we bisexual? Freud certainly believed as much, but it was Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the 1940s and 1950s that seemed to set the seal of academic approval on the bisexual theory. When Kinsey’s famous study was first published it caused shock, for he claimed that 37% of all males had experienced (or were experiencing) homosexual relationships, and that a further 13% had homosexual urges even though they did nothing to satisfy those desires.12 Here was startling proof that fully 50% of males were actively or potentially gay, and Kinsey did not conclude that the other 50% were free of homosexual urges. He postulated a scale of male sexuality which ranged from wholly heterosexual to exclusively gay, and he concluded:
Males do not represent two distinct populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum of each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this regarding human sexual behaviour the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.13
Kinsey’s influence was tremendous. His survey was the first to offer an estimate of gayness as a proportion of the population and his estimate shocked, but so it should for Kinsey used a very odd group of people to arrive at his figures. Instead of finding a representative sample from the general population, he essentially used a self-selected sample. Not only that, but his concerns about his own sexuality – although married he was probably homosexual – biased his choice of subject.14 No modern academic would recognize Kinsey’s survey as reliable, yet its influence persists, mainly because his results reinforce the fashionable bisexual theory. So Kinsey keeps his place in the pantheon despite the fact that study after study has demonstrated how utterly wrong his results were.15 Later research, as we shall see, demonstrates again and again that the incidence of homosexuality is much lower than Kinsey stated.
The gay lobby ignores the new research, preferring to claim that homosexuality is widespread. There is, after all, strength in numbers, so the more gays, the more clout the gay lobby wields. The usual figure quoted in the newspapers is that 10% of all men are exclusively homosexual and up to 33% have experienced some homosexual activity. The gay lobby publicizes these figures despite the fact that survey after survey has shown them to be wild exaggerations. The truth appears to be that between 1% and 4% of men are homosexual, and even fewer women are lesbians. An examination of the many post-Kinsey studies concludes that ‘it is unreasonable to consider the often-used figure of 10% of the male population as more or less regularly engaging in same-sex activities. The figure is closer to half that. And the figure for the lesbian population is even smaller. Further, routinely exclusive or predominantly exclusive homosexual activities are more common than bisexual activities.’16 Milton Diamond, the author of the survey, goes on to say that 10% is a political figure. In fact not one post-Kinsey survey has ever yielded an estimate as high as that. An NOP poll in America in 1989 suggested that homosexuals were 3.3% of the male population. A 1988 survey by America’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) yielded a figure of 2.4%.17 A survey conducted for the USA’s Centers for Disease Control in 1989 suggested that the total number of men who had ever experienced male to male sexual conduct, as either exclusively or occasional homosexuals, was 7.3%.18 A survey of several polls, published in 1991, derived a figure of 5–7% for men who had had homosexual experience,19 while Milton Diamond’s own study in Hawaii suggests that only 3% of males ever engage in same-sex activity. Another extensive review concluded that exclusive homosexuality was practised by no more than 5%.20 Even a telephone survey conducted in San Francisco, surely the gay capital of the world, did not reach the oft-quoted figure of 33% of males as exclusively homosexual. Only 10% of respondents admitted to some homosexual experiences.21
The most comprehensive study
