by the age of 18, 99.2% of males were exclusively heterosexual.22 Just 2.8% of the 18-year-olds had experienced homosexual acts, but less than 1% were exclusively gay. That low figure is reinforced by the findings of the National Survey of Men, considered to be the most representative study of American males, which suggested that only 1.1% of all men were exclusively homosexual and only 2.3% (which includes the previous 1.1%) had ever experienced homosexuality.23
So survey after survey suggests that the real figure of exclusively homosexual men is in the region of 1–4%. The percentage of bisexuals is so small as to count in that range. Which means that 96–99% of men are heterosexual, and almost certainly exclusively heterosexual, for the surveys also indicate that sexual preferences are overwhelmingly one way or the other. Very few men are bisexual. The vast majority of men are either gay or straight, and most men are straight.24 It is time to forget Kinsey’s extraordinary figures and time to abandon the much touted 10%.
The gay lobby’s response to that low figure is either to quote old surveys that used unreliable samples, or else to allege that the more recent results are misleading because most men are unwilling to admit to homosexual experience. ‘Homophobia’, in other words, makes men lie to researchers and thus all the surveys are flawed because people won’t be honest about their sex lives. So it is reassuring to hear about the work of Kurt Freud who investigated male sexual orientation with a machine which measured the smallest changes of penile engorgement. Erections, as any man will testify, are hard to fake and if a man has no homosexual feelings then lubricious pictures of naked boys will leave him limp, just as the most luscious centrefold will fail to arouse a gay man. Kurt Freud’s findings demonstrated almost beyond doubt that the vast majority of men were either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual. There is no sliding scale, no continuum, no latent gayness and no universal bisexuality. There is no scary gay in the straight man’s closet.25
The unisex ideal, which melds our male and female components, is beginning to look a little out of reach, yet some people still refuse to abandon the notion of bisexuality for they believe it is the route to universal toleration. Perversely, the argument that men with anti-gay attitudes are themselves gays in denial exacerbates the very thing it sets out to defeat. ‘Common sense’ suggests that most men and women are comfortable within their sexual orientation, and to suggest otherwise will irritate them. The non-gay male is being told that he is partly female, thus calling into question his masculinity, and if this annoys him he is accused of protesting too much. Thus he is twice impugned. He is annoyed – and small wonder. The attempt to dissolve stereotypes by imposing a unisex world can only reinforce prejudice. The explanation that we are all bisexual promotes the very reaction it means to abate.
But suppose there were another way to counter the average heterosexual’s aversion to homosexuality? First we need to understand what is meant by ‘homophobia’, and it is our contention that it has nothing to do with fear. Gays, as a group, are not fearsome – indeed their popular reputation is the very opposite – and because the vast majority of men experience no secret homosexual longings it seems perverse to insist that they live in constant dread of such desires. Instead the prejudice against gays appears to spring from a vague feeling that homosexual behaviour is ‘unnatural’, and not so very long ago that was also the opinion of orthodox medicine. No wonder many ordinary folk persist in thinking of gayness as a deviant condition, a perversion, something immoral, even a sin.
Before gays lose patience with the apparent intransigence of public opinion they might like to remember that until very recently the same aversions were held about left-handed people. Left-handedness was sinister (from the Latin for ‘left’) while right-handers were dextrous (from the Latin for ‘right’), and many older people will remember the painful efforts made in schools to force left-handed children to write with their right hand. No one would promulgate that nonsense today, for science has demonstrated that left- or right-handedness is not a choice, is not a deviant condition and does not reflect the malignancy or benignity of fate; it is a simple natural variation. As a result the prejudice against southpaws has disappeared.
So would anti-gay feelings disappear if people believed that gayness was a natural biological variation and not an unnatural perversion? Some research suggests that it would.26 Yet despite evidence that abandonment of the bisexual theory would lead to greater public acceptance, much of the gay lobby still insists that 10% of the population is homosexual and, moreover, that the 10% is gay not because they were born that way, but because society and culture made them that way.
If gayness is promoted by cultural pressures then we could expect some cultures or microcultures to exert more pressure than others and that the incidence of homosexuality would thus be higher in those societies. Gays often claim that proof of this exists, and point to prisons and single-sex boarding schools as places where cultural pressures do produce much higher rates of homosexuality. This is true, but just because one extraordinary incidence of social pressure produces homosexual behaviour does not prove that all homosexuality is so caused. The ‘prison’ claim promotes a logical error; the common social science error of generalizing from the exceptional to the general. (Just because electrocution causes death, one can’t therefore assume that all deaths come from electrocution!) Nor is there any evidence that prison homosexuality is a ‘lifestyle’ choice. Indeed, it seems that the most sexually active males in prisons are usually the most dominant men who, as soon as they are released from jail, go back to heterosexual partners.27 Prison proves nothing.
If the gay lobby wishes us to believe that homosexuality is caused by societal pressure they need to point to cultures which are more ‘gay-friendly’ than others and thus produce more gays. Some research done in the 1960s did indeed suggest just that, but like much early sexual research, it suffered from skewed sampling and its results have been contradicted by later surveys. (Though that does not stop gay activists like Peter Tatchell from relying on the older figures to refute the idea that gayness is a biological phenomenon.28) The more recent research, so inconvenient to the gay lobby, demonstrates that the incidence of homosexuality stays the same across cultures and nations, and it stays at our baseline figure of 1% to 4%.29 The conclusions of one leading researcher leave no room for doubt:
The implication of a finding that the incidence of homosexuality is similar in all societies and that it remains stable over time is, of course, of considerable theoretical importance. In short, we are led away from social-structural interpretations toward the view that homosexuality is, for whatever reasons, a constant element in the spectrum of human sexuality.30
And:
Societies do not create homosexuality any more than they create heterosexuality: they simply react to the ubiquitous emergence of homosexuality. Cross cultural examination of homosexuality leads us to the notion that homosexuality is a sexual orientation not a pathological and incidental manifestation of a particular social structural arrangement. It is rather a natural, fundamental form of human sexuality … the most obvious implication is that behaviour which up to now has been regarded as highly variable culturally, and thus socially determined, is less variable than previously conceived by most social scientists and at least in some important respects has a biological basis.31
The gay lobby may not like it, but the evidence suggests that homosexuality is a ‘natural, fundamental form of human sexuality’, is not ‘socially determined’, and its incidence does not change from one culture to the next. Being gay is natural; not being gay is natural.
Men do not fall on a continuum of sexuality, their sexual orientation is one way or the other. Nor is the world full of men and women who are as happy to bed one of their own sex as someone of the other. That, like the widespread incidence of homosexuality, is a myth of the 1990s and can now be safely laid to rest.
If gayness is a natural variation of the human condition, as ineradicable and inevitable as left-handedness, what causes it? One suggestion is that homosexuality derives from genes, the ancestral
