At 11:38 PM 6/22/99 -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>Statistically speaking (using Kinsey's famous statistics), 10% of the
>population is totally gay. About 30% is mostly gay or bisexual. About
>two-thirds have had at least on gay experience. Depending on how you define
>gay, it is not that rare.
I don't think Kinsey's statistics are scientifically useful (or derived). I believe the best studies to date put the totally gay population at 1-3%, with another 4-7% of the population having a significant degree homosexuality. Not surprisingly, these numbers vary with gender. I don't have a reference to point to; these are from the top of my head and are at least a couple years old.
>Speaking of statistics, gays are over-represented in the fields of
>philosophy, literature, art, genius, internet usage, computer-related
>fields, hackers, and in higher education. I would guess that this would
>increase the number of gay proto-extropians even more.
My experience strongly agrees with this in general, but I have not noticed any signficant correlation between extropians and homosexuality. I suspect this has more to do with the package of political doctrine more than anything else. Extropianism tends to be strongly libertarian politically, whereas the gay community (across the U.S. at least) appears to be far more democratic socialist (i.e. Democratic party) than libertarian in general. I could be wrong, but I think this has a lot to do with it.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com