© AP Photo/ Noah Berger
"The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans' 25% estimate in 2011...These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender," the Gallup Poll revealed.
Remarkably, the National health Interview Survey released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July, 2014 found that less than three percent of the American civilians labeled themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual.
Only 1.6 percent of adults said they were homosexual, and 0.7 percent self-identified as bisexuals. The overwhelming majority - more than 96 percent - classified themselves as straight.
According to Gallup, all available estimates of the actual homosexual population in the United States are "far lower" than what Americans estimate.
Americans Greatly Overestimate Percent Gay, Lesbian in U.S.... http://t.co/gbeapVeBko pic.twitter.com/LbhMoc9oie— GallupNews (@GallupNews) May 21, 2015According to the researchers, this phenomenon may be partly caused by Americans' lack of knowledge about statistics.
On the other hand, this overestimation may have its roots in a frequent media portrayal of gay characters on television, in movies and other media, as well as in "the high visibility of activists who have pushed gay causes, particularly legalizing same-sex marriage," the researchers elaborated.
Comment: Seems there are a couple reasons for this large discrepancy between perception and reality. First, the cultural proliferation of the gay rights movement. It's worth questioning whether the gay rights movement achieved anything on a personal discrimination level for individual homosexuals. It's difficult to objectively assess that, but apparently what can be said is that it has played a part in leading Americans to think that 25% of the population is gay when the actual figure is 3.8%. Then there is also the propagandizing figures given by Alfred Kinsey and his Kinsey scale which gave a high figure of homosexuality for years until it became "common knowledge". For instance, the study that the scale was based on reported: Clearly those numbers are total nonsense, but take the combination of the Kinsey gay propaganda and media saturation and we have one more subject on which Americans have been falsely informed.