For Gay Americans, There's Strength in Numbers

If you want to begin to understand the influence of data miner Gary Gates, go to the Google search engine and type in "65,000" plus "gay."

Oodles and oodles of news stories, press releases and commentaries will pop up, citing 65,000 as the estimated number of gay men and lesbians now serving in the U.S. military.

That's just one of the powerful numbers that Gates has been able to calculate by doing his magic of weaving together results from the growing volume of surveys that include a gay question or two.

We gay people have always sensed that we're everywhere, but we've lacked the numbers to prove it. Now, as a senior research at the Williams Institute, a progressive think tank at the University of California at Los Angeles, Gates is filling in the blanks.

Gates loves having given the nation a solid number to chew on, as Congress gets ready to reconsider the Don't Ask, Don't Tell ban on gays serving openly in the military. But his own pet number right now is 3,000.

That's the annual number of gay people who don't re-enlist because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and it includes the 600 who get booted out. With the military needing about 18,400 more people a year, Gates' 3,000 number means that just lifting the ban would get the Pentagon nearly one-sixth of the way to its target.

"The 65,000 number is the most extreme example of my making visible an invisible group," says Gates, stressing the difficulty of counting people ordered to remain silent. "But, in military circles," he adds, "the 3,000 figure gets more attention. We can say, 'Because of this single policy, you are losing 3,000 already trained and seasoned people who could really help you with your recruitment problem.' That's a big deal."

Gates got hooked on producing realistic gay numbers after diving into 1990 Census results while working on his Ph.D.

The Census Bureau, wanting to count the unmarried heterosexual couples living together, unintentionally took the first blurry snapshot of the number of gay couples: More than 145,000 listed ourselves as "unmarried partners."

Thanks largely to Gates, that number and the 2000 Census figure of 601,209 — far more accurate partly because the bureau started recognizing that some gay couples listed themselves as "spouses" — entered public policy debates.

Heterosexual attitudes are changing because individual gay people are telling our own stories. But the numbers that researchers like Gates are producing help policymakers understand that for every gay story, there are thousands of other gay Americans with similar experiences.

In the coming weeks, for example, a House Armed Services subcommittee will hold hearings on Don't Ask. Probably, a few gay veterans will testify. But Gates' 3,000 and 65,000 figures will bear witness to the true size of the problems the ban causes.

Gradually, the federal government is getting smarter about how it tabulates its own gay results. Yet, even now, if same-sex couples say we're legally married, Census-takers list us as "unmarried partners."

Gates, who married Mike Beary in Canada two years ago, calls it "divorce by Census."

How many gay Americans have wed in Canada? Nobody knows. But Gary Gates is determined to get the figure. He knows the strength in numbers.

Deb Price of The Detroit News writes the first nationally syndicated column on gay issues. To find out more about Deb Price and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.