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- 2% of men acknowledge being gay - 27% have friends who are gay
Either, the gay men really get around and know a lot of men or someone is just not being totally up front (excuse the pun).
MALE Population in U.S. 2000: 138,411,000 Males over the age of 19: 97,126,000 Admitted gays based on study (2%) 1,942,520
Study males who have gay friends 26,224,020
Ratio of admitted gays to males who have gay friends 13.5
Ratio of admitted gays to straight males (24,281,500) who have gay friends (1,942,520) 12.5
I am assuming that the gay males in the study would all have admitted to having gay friends, so the focus has to be on the straight men who say they have gay friends. I certainly fall into this latter group. First, I regard a friend as someone who I have a relationship with, who is real (not TV charter for example) that I would do stuff with, meet on a regular or frequent basis with, confide in from time to time, but being straight would not have a sexual relationship with. So, I would not put casual acquaintances in the group who I would claim are "friends". I might know a neighbor who would be gay, but because we are not friends, I can't claim that acquaintance had I been in the survey. I could say then, that I have one such friendship at the moment with a male who is gay and looking back over the years probably never had more than two such persons in my life. I probably have no more than a dozen males who I would claim are friends again based on my criteria, so my 12 male friendships at the moment consist of 1 gay and 11 straights. Given that all of the other males who are straight would have a range of friendships going from as few as one to as many as a person could possibly keep track of, I would have to say that having 50 male friends is really pushing the envelop of relationships. Thus, because that ratio of straights claiming gay friends is as high as it is, there has to be quite a few people who have common gay friends. By deduction, gays are hardly a lonely group, and not at all deprived of male friendships. That seems to contradict the general experience however. So, either more people are actually gay and won't admit they are in a survey situation, or straight males are actually engaging in an unconscious homophobia, claiming to have gay male friends, when in fact they don't know this for a fact, but only suspect. The subject needs much more study and research.
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