Well, this is amazing. Not to mention crazy: Towleroad cites a Gallup poll showing that “over half of Americans (52%) estimate that at least one in five Americans are gay or lesbian, including 35% who estimate that more than one in four are.”
Really. It’s hard to get reliable data, but my understanding is that the best current estimates of the prevalence of homosexuality is likely to be 5% or less. (Kinsey’s famous 10% figure included anyone who’d ever had a sexual experience with another of the same sex.)
UPDATE: It crosses my mind that one of the things this poll may measure, indirectly, is how many Americans can’t conceptualize percentages accurately. Who knows what they’d say if the question avoided percentages in favor of expressions such as one out of five, one out of ten, and so forth?