New, ‘most accurate’ data on men who have sex with men will help public health services and policy, hopes UBC scholar.
Forget what you may have heard about “one-in-10” people being gay – a long-discredited figure that arose in sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s 1940s research.
This week, a team of public health researchers at the University of British Columbia believe they’ve finally come up with the most accurate-to-date measure of actually how many men have sex with men, at least in Vancouver.
Their answer: 27,000 men, or 2.9 per cent of the male population over 16.
“People sometimes talk about the Kinsey Study’s 10-per-cent number as the size of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer community in the population,” researcher Ashleigh Rich told Metro. “The number ‘one-in-10′ was likely so high because there were issues related to their methodology, and the way (Kinsey) selected participants.”
But the problem of such calculations has eluded public health researchers, who need it to improve services for a demographic at higher risk of HIV.
“The opportunity to produce a local estimate is of course useful for local policy making and public health planning,” she explained.
As a population and public health researcher at UBC, she’d worked on research of gay and bisexual men’s health for the B.C. Centre for Excellence on HIV/AIDS, the Momentum Health Study. Its massive dataset inspired Rich to see if she could glean from it a population total.