The London Times : Saturday, November 17 2001

 NB: This article is neither informed by nor compatible with Catholic teaching, but the author is refreshingly frank on important questions which American “political correctness” often ignores or denies.

For Channel 4 News this week I joined a short, focused studio discussion on a vast and unfocused topic. You could call it “the way we live now” — “we” being the gay and lesbian population of Great Britain. The debate had been prompted by the poll findings of ID Research, which claims that this is the largest single survey of its kind ever conducted; 10,500 people answered the questionnaire.

I am no statistician, but a commonsense look at this survey suggests both that its findings are important and surprising but that they need to be read with one huge caveat.

The group profiled by these results is in some senses self-selected, not just because those who chose to fill out a longish questionnaire will have been unusually motivated, but because of the way it reached them. On an issue that millions of people still find deeply personal and often embarrassing, the researchers went to some lengths to seek out hard-to-reach respondents (asking contacts, for instance, to find “closeted” contacts of their own, and placing the questionnaires in libraries) but the main means of communication have been the obvious ones: gay clubs and pubs where questionnaires were placed; gay festivals, events and conferences; gay magazines; Internet sites; switchboards; community and health promotion organisations.

This adds up to what we loosely call the “gay community”. But the gay community is the visible bit. I cannot say I ever cared for it, and nor do innumberable other gay men. A very substantial proportion are out of sight and hard to reach. Many are married, many are still scared, some are old-fashioned and abhor what’s called “the scene”.

Large numbers do not go to pubs or clubs or subscribe to magazines, and a certain nervousness — a feeling that even filling in a questionnaire is somehow risky — lingers, especially outside London, though nowhere near as strong as it was. If I run through the gay friends I have in the Midlands, I cannot say many are likely to encounter such questionnaires. They don’t all go out much.

The picture this survey presents is a true picture but we need to be clear what it is a picture of: that increasing number of “out”, upfront, self-confident homosexual people who are relaxed enough about their sexuality to discuss it, even flaunt it — and answer questionnaires. That the proportion of respondents who had been to public school was double the national average may tell us more about a link between private education and self-confidence than about sexuality.

If some 10 per cent even of those gay men who did return the questionnaire were fathers, then think of those who did not. Most gay men marry.

They always have.

No comparable surveys have been made in earlier eras, so we can only guess at trends; and no matching survey was made of the wider population. When one discovers that nearly a third of gay men met their most recent partner at a gay pub, club or venue, one would like the figures for heterosexuals, too. They would be sharply lower.

The contrast can be explained easily: to cruise around for potential partners, gays need the sifting to be done for them because to make a pass at someone who turns out not to be gay can be a serious social embarrassment. This is less of a problem for straights, for whom flirting is a less dangerous venture, and who can flirt almost anywhere.

Stupid amounts of time, ingenuity and anxiety are still wasted by gay men in making the preliminary inquiry about someone before the main question to them may be put.

That business about coloured handkerchiefs in pockets never caught on — and anyway we couldn’t remember what the colours were supposed to mean. Straight people often think we have a kind of gaydar — that we can tell. I rarely have the least idea. There may yet (I am not joking) be scope for electronics in finding a way to simulate, but without the need for promenading, the oldest trick in the book: walk past someone, then turn back and look to see whether he has done so too. If he hasn’t, nothing is lost because he’ll never know you did.

For all its gaps, this survey takes us further than any yet. With no comparable statistics for the general population, it is hard to know how disappointing is the finding that 61 per cent of gays (and 74 per cent of lesbians) surveyed, who have been victims of “serious homophobic violence”, did not report it to the police; personally I’m pleasantly surprised that nearly 40 per cent of the gay men did feel able to: far more than I would have guessed. I would never have dreamt of doing so when I was beaten up.

But police attitudes have changed — though I was amazed to find that one in a hundred gay men surveyed were in the police. The same percentage, incidentally, were hairdressers.

That only one in two hundred “worked in the airline industry” may seem surprising until we reflect that there are not many air stewards’ jobs available. A survey of the sexuality of those who get them might well confirm anecdotal wisdom, but overall the findings suggest a marked weakening of the old concentrations of homosexuals in just a few sectors of employment. This owed much to the pull to go where others have already gathered. If plumbing or quantity-surveying had ever begun to attract a bit of a reputation, these too might have snowballed into disproportionately gay professions. I sometimes fear the Parliamentary Conservative Party has.

Which brings us to voting. The survey suggests support is derisory for the Tories, near the national average for Labour, and well above it for the Lib Dems. Here is both a warning and an opportunity for my own Conservative Party. Gays and lesbians do notice your policies towards them, many activists choosing party on this alone. You may assume the less visible notice, too: legions to be won or lost out there.

Confirmation of what I’ve already noticed comes in the survey’s findings on relationships. More than half of gay male respondents described themselves as “in a relationship”; with women the figure was 67 per cent. More than half of these relationships have been for six years or longer. This is a huge change from when I was in my twenties, when a proper relationship was the exception. To say in gay company these days that I neither have nor seek a lifelong partner meets an often incredulous response. At the rate at which homosexual partnerships are lengthening and heterosexual ones growing shorter, the two may approach within decades. Perhaps they will meet and cross and we shall live to see a day when people of the same sex couple for life, while heterosexuals prowl around the parks and public lavatories for snatched, promiscuous sex.

The survey’s most trumpeted result, however, is also the most easily misinterpreted. Most gay men and lesbian women think “that they were born gay”.

This is fascinating, but not for what it tells us about the nature vs nurture debate. A millennium ago 100 per cent of gays thought bad temper came from a dodgy spleen and all lesbians thought the earth was flat. We cannot simply by taking thought determine the origins of our sexuality — especially since we told the same survey that we did not ourselves realise we were gay until we were, on average, 13. What the survey does show is how much most gay men want to believe that neither they nor anybody else could have helped it, feeling (as Angela Mason of the Stonewall Group has pointed out) that it is deep, an essential part of us.

I myself suspect that sexuality is less rigid or fixed at birth than it is fashionable in gay circles to insist. All talk of bisexuality, or the possibility that people could be pushed one way or another, is taboo in polite gay society — taboo, curiously, among the same crowd who, in mellower moments, will chortle over the old gay joke: “What’s the difference between a gay man and a straight man?” (Answer: “Five pints of lager.”)

... But that’s another story, perhaps for next year. For now, it is good news that surveys like this can are financeable by the growing interest which those who sell clothes, cars and furniture, holidays, mortgages and pensions, feel towards a community which is becoming increasingly assured and (if only my old party would recognise it) conventional. Increasingly — dare I say it — conservative.

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