You go on to say yourself that LGBT folks in your country are at a high risk of assault (which I don’t doubt, much as I’m dismayed by your drawing the conclusion from this that Muslims are on the whole fundamentalists who are even more likely ). So do you really think almost 100% of them come out to acquaintances and strangers? For my part, I assume that even though I’m out in a very LBGT-safe area, counting up the known LGBT folks among my acquaintances yields an even more dramatic undercount than looking at polls.

BTW, could you please tell me in what surah and verse the Quran says anything about throwing homosexuals from a high place? The Quran has a few verses decrying (male) homosexuality, and as with Christianity, later interpreters make their scriptures out to be even worse than they are, but I don’t find anything in the Quran such as what you describe. I think you may be a victim of anti-Muslim propaganda on this one.

FWIW, among 15 surviving cousins on my paternal size, 20% are confirmed queer, plus a few likely potentials who aren’t out. Genetics? Maybe. Environment? Unlikely, but possible. Coincidence? Perhaps.

And when I take into account the number of friends who are bi-when-drunk, who quietly express their wish that they “dared” be fully bisexual or queer, but who instead opt for the safety of their heterosexual privilege, it becomes increasingly evident to me that numbers and statistics make it difficult to fully engage the question of what percentage of the population is – or could be – queer.

Fundamentalisms everywhere give me the heebie-jeebies, and rarely do they look kindly upon gay folk. Getting into a “whose fundamentalism is worse” derby is a no-win game, it seems to me. In the U.S., A group of Islamic fundamentalists murdered a lot of people one September day in 2001. Christian fundamentalists have managed to have a very strong impact on US politics in recent decades, and have shaped public policy and managed to curb/ roll back basic rights and liberties for women and gay people in a great many states and federally. I could rummage around and find many more unsavory/unfortunate/disparaging factoids all over the place I’m sure. Isolated acts of extreme violence vs. consistent, protracted influence on broad public policy affecting millions? Eeek! Really, even trying to explain how the comparison is problematic is already problematic.

The larger point for me personally is that I look hard to find the place where I and my family can make genuine connections with real people, regardless of the external or cultural or religious differences that might seem to divide us. I was met in this same intent at our girl’s Open House night last month, in a lengthy, warm conversation with the (Muslim) mother of one of my daughter’s classmates. On a person-by-person level, I think that’s the best we can do.

I really dont think you can generalise muslims, I dont think you can generalise anyone. You cant really go around saying “all gay man are camp and have aids” nor can you say “all black men want to rob you” nor can you say “muslims are a hundred times worse.” My best friend is a muslim, he is also gay. Personally, I’m afraid of everyone, but thats my personal nuerosis. I fear homophobia indiscrimitly.

I feel its inconsistant to support the rights of gay people but discriminate against muslims. Visa versa. How can someone be disabled but be racist? How can somebody be gay but deny the rights of anybody else. We should all be united in being discriminated (or preferably not be discriminated against at all.)

I cant wait till I have kids so I can teach them tolerance and acceptance of all.

But more important: “the acceptance is such that no youngish gay person would go through life denying their sexuality. ” Flat-out not true. Period.

What I meant was – someone who grew up in the seventies or eighties, thus being young today, would eventually come out, maybe in their twenties, maybe in their thirties. They wouldn’t be closeted forever, so by now (I’m almost forty) I would be able to count who was gay among my friends and acqaintances. And it’s nowhere near ten percent.
I do, by the way, get a taste of ‘homo-interest’, as everybody I meet assume I’m gay, because I’m mannish. Through high school I dressed pretty much like you do, and I assumed – reflecting cultural stereotypes, that I might be lesbian. It didn’t fill me with joy, exactly, and there was this strange attraction to men, sÃ¥ eventually I decided I was probably not gay – this was before the whole gender-bender-thing. From the beginning I made af point of not denying being gay unless I was asked directly (I was often asked indirectly, and just answered the question as if I didn’t understand the real significance of it, because I felt a denial would signal a condemnation of homosexuality). I threw myself wholeheartedly into the fight for gay marriage in the eighties, again having everybody assume I was gay and not denying it. Of course it makes a difference that I’m not actually gay, I haven’t walked around hand in hand with a girlfriend, but still, I have never been called names or harrassed in any way, not even in high school where surely everyone thought I was gay. We have had gay marriage in Denmark for twenty years (since oct. 1, 1989)
But enough about me. You are rightly concerned about current american, religious, anti-gay sentiment, so please heed my warning: muslims are a hundred times worse. Steer clear. Danish gay men and trans men are increasingly attacked by young muslim men. The imams preach hatret of homosexuality to a degree you wouldn’t believe, and they do not think a moral condemnation suffices. The koran says to kill homosexuals by throwing them from a high place, and muslims are for the most part fundamentalists in that they do not believe in interpretation of the text. Look into it.

But more important: “the acceptance is such that no youngish gay person would go through life denying their sexuality. ” Flat-out not true. Period.

It’s rare that I say this, but truly, this kind of statement could only be uttered by someone who has never experienced homophobia. You and I may live in enlightened urban centers, around abundantly educated and cosmopolitan folk. I know I do. But I still denied my own sexuality well past puberty, and I lived right across the bay from Harvey Milk, et al. during the heyday of the Gay Liberation Movement. The closest I have come to suicide was in the first year of my first love. Because of self-hatred, due to internalized homophobia.

Spend a moment looking at statistics regarding anti-gay harassment in schools and “acceptance” drops away fast and at best is joined by a huge chunk of “tolerance” and a menacing and significant proportion of “antagonism.”

Young people are killed annually for being queer in the USA. One not thirty miles from here in 2002 (Gwen Araujo), another further south, last February (Lawrence King). Two young men took their own lives last spring after buckling from anti-gay harassment in school. How young? They were 11 years old (Carl Joseph Walker-Hooper, in Massechusetts, and Jaheem Hererra, in Georgia).

Other highlights in anti-gay violence in 2009, just up ’til the middle of this last summer when I wrote about it last? (Bracketed numbers are the Wikipedia footnotes, live links in the post from which I clipped this)

• On February 18, 2009 two men were arrested in Stroudsburg, PA for the stabbing death of gay veteran Michael Goucher.[157]
• On March 1, 2009 in Galveston, Texas three men entered Roberts Lafitte bar and attacked patrons with rocks. One of the victims, Marc Bosaw, was sent to the emergency room to have twelve staples in his head.[158]
• On March 14, 2009 a gay couple leaving a concert in Newark, New Jersey were attacked by 15 teens. Josh Kehoe and Bobby Daniel Caldwell were called “faggots” and beaten. Caldwell suffered a broken jaw.[159]
• On March 23, 2009 in Seaside, Oregon two gay men were attacked and left lying unconscious on a local beach. The men regained consciousness and were treated at a nearby hospital.[160]
• On Monday, April 6, 2009, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11 year old boy in Springfield, Massachusetts, hanged himself with an extension cord after being bullied all school year by his peers. His peers said he “acted feminine” and was gay. [161]
• On Saturday April 11, 2009 a gay man in Gloucester, Massachusetts was attacked and beaten by as many as six people outside a bar. Justin Goodwin, 36, of Salem suffered a shattered jaw, broken eye socket, broken nose and broken cheek bone.[162]

From my post “The worst are full of passionate intensity,” June 12.

Some further reading:

Truth Wins Out, an organization combatting the “ex-gay” ministries myth-making machines

Gay Lesbian Straight Educators Network’s “2007 National School Climate Survey: Nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT Students Harassed” and “From Teasing to Torment: School Climate in America – A National Report on School Bullying”

I’m well aware of the wide variance between various attempts to quantify the number of LGBT people in the US and worldwide. Needless to say, we begin with the context that historically, a great many people have been loathe to admit a minority status to an unknown pollster, whether from the government or another agency. So I begin firmly rooted in the assumption that most counts will be undercounts. Given the prevailing status of gay people under the law in the US and internationally, I am unmovable on this part of the argument. At such time as gay people are not executed for being gay (executed: not killed, executed — Iraq and Iran spring immediately to mind), and when we enjoy full legal access to rights, privileges, and protections, worldwide (I won’t even talk about our full visibility and recognition in our various mainstream cultures), then we may BEGIN to get a clue how many of us actually exist. But so long as same-sex partner orientation is a value-ridden aspect of a person’s life, we’ll never really know. So all this counting stuff — bunking and debunking — is on a very, very tilted and pock-marked playing field.

I could stop right there.

But. It’s from Kinsey that I (and many people) get the 10%, and while a number of criticisms have been leveled at his methodology, many revisions still come up with similar numbers.

The three percent (3%) numbers often come from entities that are strongly biased against gay people and strongly biased towards naturalizing heterosexuality. A prime example is the Family Research Institute (won’t link to them, but here’s their mission, which says plenty: “The Family Research Institute was founded in 1982 with one overriding mission: to generate empirical research on issues that threaten the traditional family, particularly homosexuality, AIDS, sexual social policy, and drug abuse.”) Gallup (linked below) mentions their findings as representative of the low end of the % estimate spectrum.

Gallup talks about the difficulty of arriving at an accurate count here: “What Percentage of the Population is Gay?”, but does not arrive at a fixed number. Notably, they suggest the numbers vary, but range between 10% and less.

The San Francisco Public Library discusses the challenges of LGBT demographics here: “GLBT Demographics.” This article lists ten different studies with ten different results and, like me, concludes that challenges around defining identity based on sexual practice, coupled with the value-laden nature of sexual minority status, make an accurate estimate decades away.

Meanwhile, because of the whole we could be killed in several countries thing, and the fact that we’re regularly harassed and denied full legal rights and recognitions here in the good ole USA, bastion of democracy, I will always go with the high end of the estimates.

[For those who are interested in doing what we can to at least use our own damn government head-count to count those of us who WANT to be counted: NGLTF's "Queer the Census" project.]