After a number of years in which lesbians simultaneously held the top leadership spots in the major lesbigay+trans organizations, including HRC, NGLTF, GLAAD, and PFLAG, these groups now all have gay men at the helm, reports the Washington Blade.
That's really not surprising. In the pre-AIDS years, men led most of the emerging gay rights groups while women gravitated to feminist/lesbian rights efforts. AIDS changed everything, and women came to the "LGBT" forefront.
But as Paul Varnell noted in this column, surveys repeatedly show gay men outnumbering lesbians about two to one. For starters, in the 1950s Kinsey's often misinterpreted figures actually showed 4 percent of the surveyed men were exclusively homosexual vs. between 1% to 2% of women. In 1993, a team at the Harvard School of Public Health noted 6.2% of men and 3.6% of women reported a same-sex partner in the pervious five years.
And in 1994 a large National Opinion Research Center study found 9% of men and 4% of women engaged in at least some homosexual behavior since puberty; that 6.2% of men and 4.4% of women reported any same-sex attraction; and that 2.8% of men and 1.4% of women acknowledged a homosexual or bisexual identity.
So, despite differing methodologies (none without critics) and
over the decades, these ratios seem to hold up. As Varnell
concludes:
The statistics may never be as firm as we'd like, but by this point it's hard to deny a striking fact about sexual preference: Gay men outnumber gay women, by an apparently substantial margin.
Women will again take charge of many LGBT organizations as they
cycle through leaders, but it shouldn't be unexpected that gay men,
after such a dearth, now predominate. Unlike in the population at
large, demanding equal representation between gay men and lesbians
turns out not to be equitable at all.
--Stpehen H. Miller
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