HomoQuotable - Josh Barro

"Being open and unashamed about being gay is just one small thing I can do to change the culture and make life easier for people who haven't had my luck. And that's why I'm mystified by prominent gay people in business and media and Hollywood who choose to be in the closet. They have the ability to help lots of people who don't have their advantages, and they're selfishly passing on it under the guise of 'privacy.' Often, they do this while living quite gaily in places like New York and Los Angeles and reaping the benefits of social acceptance in their non-professional lives.

"Imagine, for example, that you were a prominent daytime news anchor on a national cable news channel aimed at a conservative audience, and you were gay. You would have the potential, by coming out of the closet, to change millions of viewers' perspective on gay people for the better. You'd make it easier for your closeted gay viewers to love themselves, and easier for your viewers' gay children to come out. Or you could live a fabulous gay life with your boyfriend in New York City while staying closeted to the national audience. Wouldn't that be a pretty decadent choice?" - Josh Barro, in a Business Insider piece that continues his reactions to hateful emails from Duck Dynasty fans.

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Posted in: coming out,HomoQuotable,Josh Barro,the closet

The Tolerance Spectrum

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes for the New York Times:

Using surveys, social networks, pornographic searches and dating sites, I recently studied evidence on the number of gay men. The data used in this analysis is available in highly aggregated form only and can be downloaded from publicly accessible sites. While none of these data sources are ideal, they combine to tell a consistent story. At least 5 percent of American men, I estimate, are predominantly attracted to men, and millions of gay men still live, to some degree, in the closet. Gay men are half as likely as straight men to acknowledge their sexuality on social networks. More than one quarter of gay men hide their sexuality from anonymous surveys. The evidence also suggests that a large number of gay men are married to women.

There are three sources that can give us estimates of the openly gay population broken down by state: the census, which asks about same-sex households; Gallup, which has fairly large-sample surveys for every state; and Facebook, which asks members what gender they are interested in. While these data sources all measure different degrees of openness, one result is strikingly similar: All three suggest that the openly gay population is dramatically higher in more tolerant states, defined using an estimate by Nate Silver of support for same-sex marriage. On Facebook, for example, about 1 percent of men in Mississippi who list a gender preference say that they are interested in men; in California, more than 3 percent do.

Read the full analysis.

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Posted in: internet,sexuality,the closet