Would love to see two citations for this! (post 1940s!)

~1% identified themselves as homosexual

~4% identified themselves as bisexual in varying degrees

~5% could be labeled as bi-curious (tried it/want to try it)

A further ~5% of men and ~15% of women had "fantasized about having sex with someone of the same sex at least once".

So by being extremely generous with definitions, you could claim that ~80% of the population is completely straight, and that ~20% is therefore "LGBT". But that's stretching it way too far. A reasonable interpretation is that ~1% is gay, and ~5% is LGBT.

A variety of references can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientat... and if I were to cherry pick a couple from there to try and prove my 5-10% I could go with "2003, 12% of Norwegian respondents have had homosexual sex" and in the UK in 2010 "5% of people do not identify as heterosexual".

Off that same page you could pick out some other stats to suggest that my 5-10% is too high.

Here's a couple of reasons it's complicated:

1.) There's a hell of a lot of gay people in the closet, ranging from people who have told close family and friends but won't tell a survey, to people who are in denial to themselves.

2.) Different countries have different general stances on homosexuality. Even if everyone in, for example, the UAE answered an anonymous survey completely truthfully, without fearing for the fact that if they answered anything other than heterosexual could land them in jail or worse, you've got to assume that in countries like that far less people actually realise they are gay given they are in a society that assumes nobody is, so they are never going to question themselves about it.

you've got to assume that in countries like that far less people actually realise they are gay

Can you please explain? Are you saying that people may be gay but in happy heterosexual relationships because they don't understand their true desires?

There are people in areas where homosexuality is generally accepted (like American, UK etc.) - at least accepted enough that plenty of people can be open about their sexuality without too many problems - who don't acknowledge their sexuality early on in their life. Sometimes this means "not until a few years after puberty", sometimes not until they're middle aged or even older.

Whether it's because it literally doesn't occur to them to consider the possibility, or whether they've had some feelings but ignored them, I'm not entirely sure, I suspect both cases happen. All I know is that these people do exist, people who genuinely take a long time to realise, not talking about people who know early on but take a long time to come out to others.

So, if this is possible in society where, whatever your view on homosexuality, it's an understood fact that there are gay people out there, it logically extends that those people exist in countries where gay sex gets you a death penalty - and I would assume that it happens more there, because there's no built in expectation surrounding you that some people are gay. When I was at school there was a "known fact" through the school that 1 in 20 people are gay - so when I first thought about my own sexuality, I was aware that it was far from impossible for me to be gay. In some countries I'd have been raised to believe that I am definitely straight because there are no other options.

I believe sexuality is something you are born with not brought up to have, therefore there should be as many gay Muslims as there are gay Atheists - culture can definitely prevent people from admitting it, but I think it can also prevent them from knowing it too.

p.s. Hope you reply letting me know if I've made my thoughts clearer, and if so whether you agree or think I'm talking shit. It all makes sense to me, but I have no personal experience, having been lucky enough to never have had any fears or uncertainty about my being gay, and living somewhere where I've never actually spoken to someone (internet excluded) who had a problem with me because of it.

When I was a kid and a teenager, and a young adult, I never found other men attractive personally. I suppose I could recognize attractive people to some extent but never felt sexually attracted.

Then I read Plutarch's biographies of Spartan kings and he talks a lot about the role of pederasty in the political structure of Spartan society, and also talks about wifeswapping as a part of the political structure. And I also read works talking about prevalence of homosexual activity in many other cultures. And so I asked myself "if I was in such a culture would I be attracted to other men?" and it seemed the logical answer would be "yes."

Keep in mind this was already in my thirties. I was already married, had 2 kids at the time (now have three), and all the sudden on realizing this, I started finding men sexually attractive too. I am not about to cheat on my wife with another man. But I will admit my attractions.

So what does this mean? Was I bisexual all along and just had to be convinced by Plutarch? Or was there a cognitive shift that occurred from contemplating other places and times? How can you differentiate?

Certainly it wasn't due to lack of exposure to gays. I had a gay roommate in college, a gay business partner for a while, etc....

My experience is a big part of the reason I am not convinced sexual orientation is in-born. I think it is very complicated and is relatively plastic.......

I do think sexuality can be fluid, just the same as a hetero might change what they consider "their type". However if you change from straight to bisexual, were you ever really straight? Same question for gay to straight, or whatever. Maybe everyone is on a bisexual spectrum and some people are just really near one end of it.. but if that's the case, that we're all bi, then the entire discussion is irrelevant, so let's ignore that possibility.

Is it possible that you have always been bisexual and for some reason didn't know it until reading up on history made you realise and accept it, I think yes. Is it possible that you were once genuinely not bisexual, but straight, and that this changed, yes as well. I don't think there's any way for me to know which is the case for you, I'm not sure there is any way for you to know either. Maybe I'm wrong - but hey, even if you think you know, are you necessarily right? I think I was born gay (well technically bisexual, homoromantic, but on the bisexual scale I'm about a 5.9 on the Kinsey scale [1]), but who knows, maybe if I hadn't gone to an all-boys school and experimented with friends when I was 11-13 I would today consider myself straight. For some reason I like to think that isn't the case, and that being gay is an original part of my DNA, but I guess realistically whatever way I ended up wouldn't have been any worse or better.

And finally, how "homosexual", "straight" and "bisexual" are defined changes the answer to your questions. If the fact that you never experienced MSM action, or considered it, or fantasised about it, then I guess you fit the definition of 100% straight, and therefore yes you did change to become bisexual. On the other hand, if there is something in our DNA that defines what genders we can or can't be attracted to, maybe you had homosexuality inside you without knowing it, and other people, even if they experienced the exact same life as you, down to the most minute details, couldn't become bisexual the way you did.

I really hope that sometime in my lifetime scientists discover some answers, because I think the whole subject is fascinating, and for that matter it's one that I haven't spent nearly as much time reading up on as I would like to have, so perhaps sometime I'll get onto changing that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale#Table_of_the_scale

There is another possibility too that is worth considering.

Sexuality may be, for humans, primarily social in the same way it is for Bonobos. Reproduction may simply be a functional necessity met as a side effect. If we see sex as a social interaction and the choice of a sex partner as a social matter, then the question is how various individuals fit within social structures or not.

There may be in-born aspects to how people relate to social factors and for some people these are quite evident (autistic people, for example, relate to social structures very different from non-autistic people). But even within the spectrum we might call "normal" (I don't like the idea of normal btw), there may be cognitive and even neurological reasons why some people may relate to specific social structures in specific ways.

However, beyond that, there are functionally necessary reasons why people must fit into social structures differently, and why at least some people must necessarily challenge and fall outside a social structure. Every taboo in society must have someone who challenges it. Every norm must have someone who falls outside it.

The reason is that without this process of perpetually challenging society, there are no individuals. You can't be an individual and blindly follow social norms. But beyond that perhaps on an evolutionary level, without people continually challenging, and redefining, social norms (a process which btw happens much faster in verbo-motor than literate societies), culture and society are static and dead and there is nothing to adapt it to the problems of the day.

So might be able to see various non-standard forms of sexuality (i.e. outside the social model of "normal" which in our society is defined by Barby and Ken, husband and wife, etc. i.e., monogamous and heterosexual), as necessary acts of rebellion which transform and breathe life into society. The only problem is how some Christians relate to their myths of rebellion but that's a different topic.

In this way we can perhaps past the argument as to whether gays are defective people who can't help it and simply can't conform to models of normality, or whether they are immoral people who choose to live outside accepted social norms.

I don't think that sexuality can be reduced to applied neuroscience just as chemistry can't be reduced to applied quantum physics.

One of the huge problems of course is how Christians relate to the story of the Fall from Eden. You hear this brought up all the time, and the lesson they draw from it is follow social mores. Don't rock the boat, don't rebel. But a close, careful reading suggests:

1) The fall from Eden is foreshadowed in Genesis 2 with the description of marriage.

2) The forbidden fruit is general heterosexual activity. This is particularly obvious when including a look at Middle Eastern iconography and, in particular, figures like the Pazuzu, who had a serpent-headed penis. Yes, the tree of knowledge is knowledge in the biblical sense ;-).

3) This act of rebellion creates the Biblical model of (heterosexual) marriage.

The problem for Christians is that the very model they want to push arises from the very act of rebellion they want to use to bludgeon everyone else into submission.

Furthermore, you can hate anal sex yet still be bisexual, homosexual, etc.

Far from it, you have it backwards. My point is that having had homosexual sex doesn't automatically make you bi/homosexual. I've said nothing about the relation in the other direction.

Furthermore, you can hate anal sex yet still be bisexual, homosexual, etc.

Of course. I never said anything to the contrary. There are lots and lots of ways of having "sex", many that don't involve sticking your penis in an orifice and having penises stuck in your orifices.

edit: In case something was unclear, Kinsey's numbers obviously also included people who self-identified has home/bisexual, no matter their sexual history(or lack of it)

If you get some sort of working visa in the US, you can in many cases also get a visa for your spouse so that both of you can live there and work there. However, the %#""&!! DOMA explicitly defines spouse as someone of the opposite gender that you are married to.

It doesn't matter if same-sex marriage is legal or not in the country you're from. It doesn't matter if same-sex marriage is legal or not in the US state you're going to. If your husband or wife is of the same sex as you, you're just screwed by the visa process, you can't bring them.

I think there is virtually no chance that Thomas will vote against a 10th Amendment argument. The only hope congress has on this (though kudos for them for defending the doomed law) is to hope the court follows Comstock and gives the federal government broad authority to tack on all kinds of things to federal powers.

I think the chance of this though is very, very small.

However, if they do strike it down on 10th Amendment grounds expect a lot of hand-wringing from liberal law school professors. When a district court found it violated the 10th Amendment, Jack Balkin (very much on the liberal side) said something to the effect that while he wanted to see DOMA struck down, the 10th Amendment was just too dangerous to the idea of centralized government to allow that to stand.

Also, deterring people who are against gay marriage might be a good thing.