Atlas Forum LGBT Census 2014

[All Along The Watchtower]

There's selection bias and then there's a near 50-50 ratio. Yikes.

Well, when I saw the thread title, I assumed the thread would contain questions for LGBT posters, not a question for all posters asking whether they are LGBT or not. So I suspect many non-LGBT posters didn't even click.

I believe other polls have shown a near 50% LGBT ratio though. I would have expected a place like this to be at least 90% male, so that part of forum demographics never surprised me - but the gay thing is difficult to understand. Why would LGBTs be more interested in electoral maps than straights?

The fact that our civil rights are currently a political issue and hot topic would make me expect LGBT people to be more politically oriented overall, though certainly not by the margin shown in this poll. I guess there's also the fact that people tend to me more honest about their orientation online when behind the veil of anonymity.

I have two hypotheses.

One: Fewer gay people are interested in sports.  Politics fills the same spot in the male brain as sports, it's competitive in exactly the same way.

Two:  Maybe this is just me, but I felt like being into news, politics, reading the New York Times, etc when I was a teenage Howard Dean supporter in high school, in real America, that sort of made you  a "fag."  As a gay kid, I think you sort of say to yourself, "well, I'm gay anyway, so I'm just going to be myself, work on the school newspaper and hang out with my weird friends.  There's no use pretending I'm a football dude, or a skateboard dude or a generic dumbass who likes drinking Busch lite in a garage, or whatever would be cooler than a political nerd.  I think that partly why gay men are over-represented in a lot of careers like advertising, fashion, law, journalism, academia and media.

Or perhaps that rather isolated, socially awkward/nerdy,  suburban, upper-middle class kids (a demographic which this forum attracts) have a higher representation of people who are openly LGBT, relative to the general population?

I know that this forum is overwhelmingly white and male in addition to all of those things I listed so I wonder if that also has an effect....

[All Along The Watchtower]

The issue isn't open vs. closeted tendencies unless you think literally half of everyone is gay on the inside

Ah, but is this board (disregarding the non-American users, which admittedly might not be fair )  even close to being a representative sample of the US population?

Maybe the fact that this board skews towards youngs might be part of the issue.

[All Along The Watchtower]

The issue isn't open vs. closeted tendencies unless you think literally half of everyone is gay on the inside

Ah, but is this board (disregarding the non-American users, which admittedly might not be fair )  even close to being a representative sample of the US population?

Maybe the fact that this board skews towards youngs might be part of the issue.

So you think half of youngs are LGBT?

perhaps the homosexual agenda has finally prevailed

lolno

I just think that youngs are more likely to say they are LGBT than olds.

But admittedly it wouldn't account for ALL of this forum's unusually high LGBT population.