Book: The New Gay Science
Through an account of the social lives of sexuality statistics, my book project—The New Gay Science: How Demography Shaped Sexuality Knowledge and LGBTQ Politics—shows how the norms of demography and contemporary understandings of LGBTQ people mutually (re)shaped one another as demography rose in prominence to become the authoritative language for making claims about sexuality.
Entanglements between science and sexuality are not new, but the 20th century saw an important shift from the question “what is homosexuality?” to “what is the LGBTQ population?” The former was a question imposed by the authorities of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology on individual patients, criminals, and “sinners.” While this framing understood homosexuality more as a (pitiable) kind of person than as pathologically deviant behavior, the essential question remained one of etiology and the biological sciences charged forward locating difference in gay brains, hormones, and genes. Although this medicalized approach did not disappear, I argue that beginning in the post-war period and increasing dramatically with the advent of the gay rights movement, the most important question in the imperative to understand sexuality became population-based, and thus, sociological. This was the beginning of the making of a new population and an exemplar of the process in which scientific classificatory practices interact with the people classified. I argue that demographic sexuality knowledge and the sexual minority demographic were co-produced in this historical moment: that is, demographic definitions and statistics began to shape how people understood and described their sexuality, and simultaneously, activism by LGBTQ people shaped the way demographers defined and measured sexuality.
As gay and lesbian people and organizations became increasingly visible and vibrant, top-down identification of individual deviance or difference was transformed. This shift from “the homosexual” to “the LGBTQ population” was not imposed from above as new form of surveillance and control, but rather demanded from below in an (effective) effort to claim civil rights by analogy to other minority populations. This was necessary for not only a fundamental sense of human dignity but also the possibility to organize and make demands for inclusion—in society and in science. I argue that a critical transformation took place as these demands gained traction through engagement with population science, and centrally, with demographic classificatory systems. I investigate the conditions under which this new gay science emerged and the forces that shaped how it functioned in public and legal discourse.
I find a demographic imaginary in which gay people were beginning to be conceptualized as a group but without data to illuminate or humanize this minority. Newspaper articles in my analysis of decades of media coverage at the intersection of science and sexuality called attention to what we did not know and were littered with guesses and gaps. LGBTQ was a demographic without a demographer. Invented and misappropriated numbers—such as Kinsey’s 10%, a number that became a popular stand in for “gay” in all kinds of publications and organizations over the coming decades—filled the demand for data and took on mythical characteristics that would shape LGBTQ politics for decades to come. In the 1980s–2000s, expert demographers began to actively study the size and characteristics of the LGBTQ population, frequently overcoming political pushback and resistance from the state to do so. Initially, these counts were conducted through creative uses of existing data (a prime example was the use of the 2000 U.S. decennial Census, the first to ask about unmarried partners, to identify and enumerate same-sex couples and their children). These data established the need (and ability) to study the LGBTQ population to a new audience of demographers. Over the next two decades, demographers and survey methodologists would adapt all kinds of questionnaires and study designs with gay research participants in mind. If the population sciences once ignored the non-heterosexual respondents in their samples (assumed to be outliers or inconsequentially small in number), these fields are now expected to grapple with how explicit consideration of sexual minorities might shift knowledge on the topics they study.
As demographers increasingly attended to measuring the size of the LGBTQ population, their work became an obligatory passage point in public and political discussions of LGTBQ people. My analysis tracks this change through three cases: (1) the use of social demographic expertise in three recent marriage equality cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, (2) discussion of the intersection of science and sexuality in newspaper articles, and (3) the inclusion of SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) measures on demographic social surveys. The centrality of demography to political debates about sexuality reshaped public understandings of LGBTQ people. I show how the norms and interests of demographers (standardized closed-ended questions to track variation over time and place, health and risk framings needed in part to secure funding) clashed with the changing politics of parts of the LGBTQ community that increasingly embraced open identities and rejected confining boxes. Demographic knowledge about sexualities in turn helped create and solidify new identities (MSM, non-heterosexual), theories (sexual fluidity), and research agendas (surveilling “at risk” populations, correlating negative outcomes with behavior/identity discordance) that were often at odds with what activists wanted and sociologists of gender and sexuality learned in their research.
My research grapples with a fundamental paradox at the heart of sexual politics: sexuality statistics were demanded from below by the LGBTQ community in efforts to be counted and thus known and incorporated into the body politic, even as this push amplified the power of the new gay science, and especially the disciplinary power of demography over queer lives. To demonstrate the co-production of demographic sexuality knowledge and the sexual minority demographic, I trace the social lives of sexuality statistics. I define the contours and identify the consequences of this specific feedback loop by analyzing the production and circulation of an essential form of demographic sexuality knowledge: population counts. By analyzing survey questionnaires, tracing sexuality knowledge through court cases, and interviewing data stakeholders, I show how the politics of sexuality is shaped by demographic norms and the various kinds of maneuvers demographers make and justify—which ultimately truncates the space of sexuality by putting order to the messiness at the heart of many queer identity projects.