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After years of wild guess and flawed estimations, Gallup has attempted to get some hard data on just how many gay, lesbian, and bisexual people there are in America. So how good are their are numbers?

The polling company took state-by-state surveys of all 50 states and District of Columbia, asking one simple question: "Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?" With more than 200,000 responses over the course of six months, this is a pretty large sample for a seemingly simple question that has yet to be definitively answered. Gallup also found that outside of a few outliers, the results were remarkably consistent across the entire nation. Averaging all the state polls together gives you a nationwide average of 3.5 percent, and every state in the union (but not D.C.) is within two percentage points of that average. That's also right around the margin of error for the polls.


Does that seem right? Well, no one really knows, honestly, because no one has ever attempted a true census-like survey of the whole nation before. As many LGBT writers and activists have pointed out, for years many simply just went with a guesstimate of around 10 percent of the country being not straight; a number that probably seemed way too high or way too low depending on where you lived and who you hung out with. In a previous Gallup poll young people and women have even guessed that the number could be as high as 30 percent, proving that people aren't really good at estimating these kinds of things.

The survey also counts on people to self-identify, which can complicate the results in all sorts of ways. Respondents might be gay, but not out (even to themselves), and they're far more likely to come out if they live an area where there are a lot of other gay and lesbian people. Or maybe they simply don't see themselves in terms of L-G-B-T definitions.

Take D.C., which is the lone major outlier, with more than 10 percent of the population identifying as LGBT. But D.C. is really a city, with a single urban population, not a state, which contains a mix of rural, suburban, and urban areas, so you'd be better off comparing its results to those Boston, Atlanta, and Denver than Massachusetts, Georgia, or Colorado. (D.C. also had the survey with the smallest sample size and the biggest margin of error.) Still, Andrew Sullivan argues that politics has a particularly draw for young gay people, but again—personal experience does not equal hard data.

There's also the matter of Gallup itself and whether any survey can accurately measure this particular statistic. Asking people to honestly self-identify with anything isn't never easy, and identity is something a lot of young people still struggle to answer to themselves, let alone a Gallup call center employee. Of course, that's a methodology issue that no census could solve, so any attempt to measure the population this way is going to be imperfect.

But as one expert points out, this study is still significant, because these aren't just updates to old data—this is completely new way of looking at the numbers, and it will be important to see if they shift overtime as new polls are taken. Then again ... this is also the same polling company that, one day before the 2012 presidential election, said Mitt Romney was in the lead. So your mileage may vary.

When I was growing up in Florida, and when Andrew Sullivan was growing up in England, those interests dedicated to the empowerment of young gays insisted that, as a matter of rule, about 10 percent of the population in modern countries was gay. That included those who openly identified as gay — a small percentage of the 10 percent — and those who did not, either because of the pressures of the closet or because their sexual identity was in a state of flux.

Before I came out, I remember feeling skeptical. I knew what I was going through, and I was pretty certain that I was, ah, more special than that. I thought the 10 percent figure was a talking point for gay activists, a way to make the community feel bigger than it was. My gaydar was not pinging for one in 10 guys, even as I began to select my peers more and more, as I transitioned from the closet to the open world, from high school to college.

I was one the more conservative lot in college in part because I argued then, as Andrew does, that:

Why on earth does it matter if we make up 10 percent or 1 percent? A minority’s civil rights are not dependent on how many of them there are or how large a segment of society they form. Do we say: sorry, guys, you only form 2 percent, you don’t meet the minimal bar for becoming a minority? It’s not like running for the Knesset. It struck me then and now as part of a wearying tendency among some gays to think that every straight dude is just a few beers away from being gay (that’s not how it works); or a desperation to feel somehow more significant because of larger numbers.

Living in New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, three American cities quite densely packed with openly gay people, the 10 percent number no longer really mattered. Two decades worth of incredible, almost exponential change in the status of homosexuality in American society have rendered the numerical argument irrelevant. (Andrew's early writings were one of the largest single contributors to this new acceptance, as was Hollywood's decision to embrace non-stereotypical gay characters in the 90s.)

The 10 percent figure persisted because of a variety of formal studies, many conducted by researchers sympathetic to gay people, that very broadly interpreted the definition of gay. But Alfred Kinsey was the first, and his methods for figuring this out were rather unreliable.

A more realistic number is that people whose sexual identities are not primarily heterosexual; that is, whose primary erotic orientation is not toward a member of the opposite gender, is about 3.5 percent, per Gallup. (A researcher I respect surveyed Census data and offers a slightly higher percentage: About 3.8 percent, which equates to about 9 million people.)

This is a big number. It's also a tiny one.

I don't want to hazard a guess as to whether gays are over-represented in certain high-profile occupations because that requires a much longer discussion of gay history and culture. (What percentage of President Obama's major donors were gay? I don't know, but I do know that a joke once went around Obama HQ calling gay bars "Obama donation centers.")

But I'm fascinated by a 2011 Gallup poll showing that young adults and women thought that gays make up 30 percent of the population. (!)

Not even close. So what's the reason for the difference between reality and perception?