AT LEAST THEY'RE TEN PERCENT OF NETWORK TV CHARACTERS:

Study sees gays as 1.7 percent of population (Associated Press, April 7, 2011)

How many gays are there in the United States? Gary Gates has an idea but acknowledges pinpointing a solid figure remains an elusive task.

Mr. Gates is demographer-in-residence at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a think tank based at the University of California, Los Angeles. For the institute’s 10th anniversary this week, he took a scholarly stab at answering the question that has been debated, avoided and parsed since sex researcher Alfred Kinsey said in the 1940s that 10 percent of the men he surveyed were “predominantly homosexual.”

Mr. Gates‘ best estimate, derived from five studies that have asked subjects about their sexual orientation, is that the nation has about 4 million adults who identify as being homosexual, representing 1.7 percent of the 18-and-over population.

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