Christopher Isherwood perceptively wrote: ‘You first know you are a homosexual when you discover you can fall in love with another man’; and this neatly brings an abstract definition into a human context.
There is some evidence that human beings are essentially bisexual, but that conditioning in childhood and role models of parents turn them into unisexual, usually heterosexual, beings. This suggests that there is a continuum between exclusive heterosexuality at one end and exclusive homosexuality at the other end. Most people are exclusively heterosexual, some are bisexual, some are exclusively homosexual.
In such a continuum, how many people in society are exclusively homosexual? Is the number small or large? Most reported investigations are of little value because they are based on selected groups, or are anecdotal.
One investigation stands out as likely to provide a reasonable estimate of the prevalence of homosexuality in a community. This is Alfred Kinsey’s very carefully organized and meticulously conducted survey of over 4000 American men carried out in the late 1940s. The men represented as far as was possible a true sample of American society. Kinsey took great care to check his information in many ways, so that he could avoid the charge (which, as he had anticipated, occurred) that his findings were biased, because of his evasions or exaggerations. What he found surprised, horrified, and was denied by most Americans, but despite the attacks, his findings have not been disproved. In fact, they have been validated by subsequent surveys in the U.S.A. and in Britain.
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