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“There was an op-ed [by Dan Savage] in Wednesday’s New York Times asserting that 70 percent of Americans personally know someone who is gay. That seems statistically improbable. Somewhere between two and four percent of American males identify themselves as gay. (The figure is much lower for women.) Most of them are congregated in cities, and in those parts of cities known to be gay-friendly. Chelsea and the West Village, along with the Castro district of San Francisco and counterparts in other larger cities, are not America. Gays live in such places precisely because they are not America.” (Various appalled Catholics and conservatives comment here.)
The authoritative General Social Survey (discussed briefly in the Reader, Feb. 25, 2005) doesn’t have a perfectly apposite question among those it asks every year or two of a representative sample of Americans, but the answers to this one over the decades show the direction in which our country is headed:
In the 2000s, 80 percent.
