How many gays are there? It depends.

Since the time of Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade and his investigation of “covert deviants,” homosexuality has achieved both public and scientific visibility. Once considered by scientists to be a legal, moral, and mental abnormality, homosexuality is currently perceived by many scholars and youth as merely statistically deviant. This is not to deny that some portion of the US population still believes that same-sex sexuality is a religious and psychological aberration. It is the statistical and not the psychological health question that I address in this chapter: How many gays are there? In other contexts I explore whether the answer to this question matters in select (primarily clinical) domains (Savin-Williams, 2006) . Early gay scholars answered the “how many” question based on a misreading of Kinsey’s findings (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948 ; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953) , proclaiming, “10%!” Recently, sexologists have more prudently proposed a lower fraction, less than 1 in 25 (Diamond, 1993) . A questionnaire study of US and Canadian college students concluded that findings did not “by all reasonable criteria” support suggestions that 10% of young adults identify as nonheterosexual. “Instead, our findings were much closer to estimates [citations] of less than 4% of males (and less than 2% of females) being predominantly non-heterosexual” (Ellis, Robb, & Burke, 2005 , p. 578). Essentially neglected in previous prevalence research are the critical, inherently logical prior questions, “Who’s gay?” and “How much gayness is necessary to be gay?” I argue that estimates of the statistical standing of nonheterosexual orientation groups must first decide how relevant populations are defined. Because of dramatic changes in recent cohorts regarding the openness and possibility of nonheterosexuality (Savin-Williams, 2005) , my focus, except where otherwise noted, is on data collected from adolescents and young adults growing up during the past two decades.