One of the more ludicrous allegations that the Homophobic
Front continues to utter is that gays and lesbians are recruiting. I doubt the people who mention that believe
it. I suspect they are hoping that more
gullible people will buy it. It’s all
about the power of suggestion—Happy Meals make kids smile, laughtracks cue us
to the uproariously funny parts on reruns of “The Brady Bunch” (Oh, that Alice!) and gay marriage laws make
Grandma Hazel consider leaving the ever-flatulent Grandpa Fred for that heretic
who wears running shoes to church. (Should have never let Hazel go to a taping
of “Ellen”. She danced in the aisles
right along with that curmudgeonly recruiter posing as a talk show host!)
Despite Ellen’s solid daytime ratings, there doesn’t seem to
be a surge in lesbian numbers. And that
Ryan Murphy with his “Glee” hasn’t converted straight teens to gay any more
than his “American Horror Story” has led to creepy neighbors annihilating new
residents in the house next door. Gay
marriage laws in Canada (and in Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Norway, Portugal,
Iceland, Argentina, Denmark, Belguim, and the Netherlands) haven’t spawned a slew
of Tonys defecting from weddings with Tinas and eloping with Tims.
If we are recruiting, we’re doing a really poor job at it.
When I was young and closeted, an oft-cited stat provided
comfort: one in ten. It was a figure lifted from Alfred Kinsey’s
1953 study, Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male, and gays latched on to it as a comforting “fact”. The statistic helped many of us cope. Ten percent of the population! Yep, one in ten...I am not alone.
I remember sitting in high school classrooms
of thirty and wondering who my two cohorts were. (Please,
please let one of them be Randy Weir!) In
college lecture courses with ninety, I had eight Friends of Dorothy. A potential for friendship, solidarity, maybe
something more! And yet, I could rarely
peg anyone else with the gay tag.
I held onto the stat even without proof of its
veracity. Didn’t know the Kinseys, but
they must have been highly accurate researchers. All research is true, right? Studies never conflict; they are never
repudiated.
Within a year of moving to L.A., I bought a white t-shirt
with an upside down pink triangle and the names of famous gays and lesbians
from history superimposed on it. Da
Vinci! Michelangelo! Wilde!
My heroes. Below the triangle,
that familiar phrase: ONE IN TEN. I proudly wore that shirt when dusting on
Saturday mornings. (Blinds closed, of
course.)
Even before I moved to Nowhereland, I realized that
statistic was heavily inflated. At some point
during my time in Los Angeles, I honed my gaydar. Ten percent of Los Angelinos? Not a chance.
Vancouverites? No. Not even in the West End gay ghetto. Both cities had a clear presence, but one in
twenty felt like a stretch.
Now I would be thrilled to be immersed in a population where
five percent of people identify as G, L, B or T. Where I live, our numbers—at least for G, B
and T—would be deemed statistically insignificant by Kinsey’s academic
ancestors.
I’d say there are about 30,000 people along the sixty
kilometres of coastline where I live.
3,000? Baloney! 1,500?
Someone’s hallucinating. Gay
sightings are extremely rare. In the
seven years I’ve lived here, I’ve known two single gay men under the age of seventy
and I dated them both. No hope for any
kind of relationship. I believe both
wisely realized there were no prospects to be had and moved back to Vancouver.
Being as I’m stuck in my current environment—I took my house
off the market today—I would like to recruit some of those alleged
recruiters. Bring on the gays. Stat!
I’ll settle for one in a thousand.
