From the Editor: Matthew 7:1-2

Much of this issue of Public Opinion Pros has to do with what Americans think about gay people. We lead off with an article by Patrick J. Egan and Kenneth Sherrill, examining the trends in public attitudes toward gays and lesbians over the past few decades. Next up is Susan Pinkus, who breaks down the findings of a recent Los Angeles Times poll about gays into demographic groups, and speculates on how the relationship of these groups to the electorate might have affected the outcome of the presidential election.

When I first started thinking about what more I could write on this subject by way of introduction, I was drawn to the data that had not found a place in either of these articles—Americans' answers to questions like, "If you had a child, would you permit or not permit your child to read a book that contains a story about a same-sex couple?"; "If you had a child who told you he or she was gay or lesbian… would you be upset or not?"; "Do you think a person's homosexual orientation can be changed?"

And then I realized there was a county not heard from. By getting wrapped up in the views of everyone in general I had, as we so often do when we single out particular individuals or groups for scrutiny, been treating the subjects of discussion as though they were not in the room; invisible—or, in this case, mute.

They need not be. There have been several surveys conducted in recent years with samples of gay, lesbian, and bisexual respondents. One was done in 2000 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, with fieldwork by Princeton Survey Research Associates.

As the Kaiser folks are careful to tell us in their report, the challenges of sampling and interviewing a population of indeterminate size whose status in American society is marginal at best and subject to condemnation at worst are considerable. But, handled with the appropriate caution, the findings of their poll of 405 randomly selected, self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults lend some preliminary insights to the attitudes and experiences of gay people in the United States that we otherwise might not acquire.

Let us allow the numbers to speak for themselves:

These are sad numbers. They are sadder still if we surmise that many, if not all, of these respondents began having these experiences at quite a young age. (Remember junior high school?) And it is my guess that they are also underreported numbers, when we take into account the absence from the sample of those who would not reveal themselves to an interviewer as gay, perhaps out of recollection of such experiences or fear of them.

In this issue of POP, Humphrey Taylor, David Krane, and Randall K. Thomas report the findings of an investigation of social desirability bias that began when they discovered that respondents to their online surveys were consistently more likely to identify themselves as gay than were those talking to human interviewers in telephone surveys.

And the supposition that we are not hearing in the Kaiser survey from the more leery members of the gay population is perhaps borne out by the fact that 88 percent of those who did choose to participate said they had been open about their sexual orientation with family members, and 93 percent with their heterosexual friends. Surely their responses paint a brighter picture of gay life in America than actually prevails.

Numbers like the ones above add a new dimension to the results of the general population L.A. Times survey, in which 44 percent of respondents said they would not permit a child of theirs to read a book containing a story about a same-sex couple, 60 percent said they would be upset if a child of theirs told them that he or she was gay, and 61 percent believed that, in at least a few cases, a person's homosexual orientation could be changed.

Eighty-eight percent of the gay people in the Kaiser survey believed their sexual orientation could not be changed.

In a society where love is the answer, the many-splendour'd thing that makes the world go 'round, and the force that conquers all as it makes a house a home, such findings and differences in perspective, along with the results of other surveys of and about gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans, say something enormously important about the things we choose to judge about other people, the assumptions we make about their lives, and the ways in which we treat each other.

It remains for us to determine what that something is, and what we will choose to do about it.