Who is my gay friend?
	According to lots of very important studies, there are lots and lots of gays in the World.  Of course these studies vary wildly all over the place as to how many people are actually gay.  Alfred Kinsey, the famed sexual behaviourologist, found that 37% of men had achieved orgasm with the help of another man.  Wow, that's a third of all men doing something gay.  An Autralian phone poll however revealed that only 1.6% of Australian men identified themselves as gay.  This means American men in the 50s were gayer than a modern Australian male.  Here in Britain, the most recent study I can find (1992?  Isn't anyone interested in gays anymore?) said that 6.1% of men had "any homosexual experience", and 3.6% had had more than one gaying up session.  Wikipedia (the fountain of all knowledge) has this to say on the matter:- In general, surveys by anti-gay activists tend to show figures nearer 10%, while surveys quoted by gay activists tend to show figures nearer 10%, with a mean 4-5% figure most often cited in mainstream media reports. I don't know how to make up the 9% disparity between gay-love surveys and gay-hate surveys, but the idea that 5% of everyone might be gay made me all curious.  Theoretically if I wrote down the name of twenty of my friends one of them would be a gay. So this was cool, I made a list of twenty male friends.  I included myself on the list, as I would be a good starting point for the "not gay".  Working down the list, no obvious gay candidate stood out.  So creative thinking was in order.  First of all, I had to take out the people who are married/engaged/in long-term relationships.  Unfortunately this was rather a lot of people, and I didn't want to be labelled as "statistically gay", first because I'm not gay, and secondly lots of gays have a hard time coming to terms with their sexuality, so for me to be gay due to my poor statistical analysis skills would be a mockery of their struggle. Secondly, the criteria for the modern gay has changed somewhat from the classical gay days.  Everybody likes gay music.  In fact, I'd say that the vast majority of music is inherently gay in one way or another.  At one end you have metal, with it's long hair, leather, manly bear love gayness, and at the other dance music, with it's love everyone, let's get sweaty and rub up against each other gayness.  So music taste is not necessarily a good barometer for levels of gay.  Well, at least not for my list of 20, as nobody listens to Hi-NRG.  Secondly previously gay things like hair conditioner, make-up, moisturiser and the like have been ruined by the "metrosexual male".  I hate those damn faux-gays.  Even camp men are now accepted into the ranks of hetereosexuals.  So with no clear criteria for selecting who my gay friend was I was stuck. This of course led me onto the realisation that perhaps, I don't have a gay friend.  This was worrying, as surely if gays are as common as 1 in 20 people, I should have at least one in my circle of friends.  But this idea of friends via "quotas" also seemed ridiculous.  15% of Britain is over 65 and I haven't got one OAP friend to go down the pub with.  3.1% of Glasgow City residents are Muslim, and I don't have a Muslim friend.  Most of this, probably comes from my sheltered upbringing, being white and middle class isn't helpful.  But the idea that you should have a token friend from some social or ethnic group is laughable.  I decided that this was a good enough answer and gave up trying to find my gay friend, safe in the knowledge that I had got the moral high ground. Then, fuck it, I picked a friend to be the designated gay.  Over the coming months I will gradually help him come to realise that statistically, he has to be gay, and slowly but surely introduce him to the gay culture he has been missing out on.  I'm sure he may protest, "but I'm not gay" he will say, but I'll inform him patiently and firmly that in order for the Universe to stay on track, he must be gay, because the numbers don't lie. Back