Where Are They All?

Depending on who you listen to, the gay community makes up anything between 5% and 20% of the overall population with the general consensus seeming to be around 10%. In Adelaide, where I live, the general population is just over a million people, so using the above average, there should be around 100,000 gays. [And by gays, I am including gay men and lesbians.]

Even if we work on 5%, that still makes the gay population some 50,000 individuals. And, if we make one further assumption that the split is 50/50 between men and women, that makes 25,000 of each sex. In the last census [2001 report], 24.1% of the population was over 55, whilst 32.6% were under 25. This leaves 43.3% of the population being between 25 and 55, or roughly 430,000 people.

You are probably wondering where I am heading with this. But please bare with me.

Ignoring the extremes, if 430,000 people are between 25 and 55, and we work on 5% of the population being gay, that means that gay population of Adelaide is 21,500. If we assume 10%, then it balloons to 43,000 and if we go further to 20%, its a whopping 86,000.

That is a large and sizeable gay community regardless of which percentage you use.

As someone who used to go out on the [gay] scene quite regularly, I can honestly say that the total gay people that go out would be no more than about 500. To be totally honest, a large portion of these people are also under 25, but we can ignore this for the time being.

The question I want to find an answer for, is this.

If there are 21,500 gay people in Adelaide aged 25-55, and only 500 go out, where the hell is everyone else? Even if half of them are partnered off, that would still leave over 10,000 who are single. Sure, a lot go to straight venues - but 10,000 of them? Surely they can't all be closet celibate gays. Even going one step further and assuming that 75% of them are closet gays who either live a straight life and/or are married to someone of the opposite sex, that still leaves 2,500 single people.

Where does one go to find them? To meet them? I can hear you saying "you already answered that ... they go to straight venues", but honestly, if they are closet gays in straight venues, picking them out isn't an easy task. My gaydar only works 90-odd percent of the time. Is there any other way of meeting up with these non-scene gay people, other than the chatrooms, beats and straight venues?

And further to that, how do they end up "hooking up" with others?

I have taken a very conservative figure here, but even on this, there are a lot of gay people who simply don't go out.

Any thoughts anyone?

James