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INTEREST: Black Butler Creator Comments on Works With Homosexual Love

^It is very far from the truth in fact. This article cites approximately 5% of LGBT population, on average one gay person per classroom, whilst this Dentsu survey from 2015 has the number at 7.6%. That's a difference of millions. And that's if you generously assume every LGBT person answered the surveys honestly, which, given the stigma against it, is unlikely

Even if one accepts those surveys as accurate, which is certainly up to debate,, LGBT and its multiple various acronyms are a huge blanket of terms and lifestyles. If the topic is specifically gay men, then the number will be vastly lower. If there's 1% for every letter in LGBT, then that would equate to roughly 99% of people not being one of those letters. Anything using the term LGBT or its variants should be questioned, though.

^It is very far from the truth in fact. This article cites approximately 5% of LGBT population, on average one gay person per classroom, whilst this Dentsu survey from 2015 has the number at 7.6%. That's a difference of millions. And that's if you generously assume every LGBT person answered the surveys honestly, which, given the stigma against it, is unlikely

I know shifting the goalposts is Your Thing(TM) but Velshtein's claim was that "99% of the Japanese population is straight" not "only 1% of Japanese population is gay". So sorry, but your clarification is not only uselessly speculative, but also irrelevant. Also, implying that the survey might not be accurate in so that people would falsely claim to be LGBT is beyond ridiculous

The 2-3% I brought up was for the worldwide human population, not just in Asian countries.

You neglected the article's explicitly stated caveat of that 5% statistic.

And I can't even properly read the second article, even with google translate. All I can tell is that it appears to say the LGBT population is at 7.6%.

And of course, this assumes that the articles are correct.

Dismissing the articles as "might not be correct" while still sustaining that "99%(ish)" of Japanese people are straight based on literally nothing is quite rich ::eyeroll::

And there is a huge difference between 1.27 million people (your 1% arbitrary estimate) and 6.3-9.6 million people (the 5-7.6% estimated by the articles). Like I said, a difference of millions. How is over 5 million people not a "giant minority" by your standards? It's very easy to diminish it by using percentages, but we're talking about millions of people (yes, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc etc) that aren't being represented in media, and a big part of it is due to the social stigma against them. If this was about representing only the majoritarian group in any given society, then anime should be primarily focused on people aged 25-54 (37% of the population) and 65+ (27%) instead of the incredibly minoritarian high school demographic (9.6% for ages 15-24, not too far from the highest estimate of LGBT population)

There have even been a few scandals about how publishers and promotional media has been systematically hiding or erasing the wedding rings Yuri and Victor wear in Yuri on Ice. The production team were surprised to find out that an illustration revealing an inner engraving of the rings was not included in the production artbook even though it was supposed to. There was also a big outcry about an illustration that was included in one of the guidebooks, the artist claimed it was originally submitted showing Yuri's ring but she was then asked to remove it by the publishers -and it wasn't present in the first previews of the poster-. After the scandal, it was restored. If even such a tiny little thing gets suppressed by the media, it's not even a stretch to believe there are more LGBT people that wouldn't give an honest answer to the surveys, when they've carried that social pressure and stigma their whole lives.

Velshtein wrote:

You neglected the article's explicitly stated caveat of that 5% statistic. And I can't even properly read the second article, even with google translate. All I can tell is that it appears to say the LGBT population is at 7.6%. And of course, this assumes that the articles are correct.

The ever increasing number does seem a bit convenient and there is reason why people tend to have more faith in the studies that were done several decades ago since they were more about objective facts and less about political issues. The diversity lab study number of 7.6% was from an internet survey. As for the 5% number it is from "a range of surveys" from a gender theory professor. Of course people who want to believe in the higher numbers will go with them. At this point it has become a political issue and scientists are people who are just as easily influenced by politics as any other person.

The 2-3% figure I had read on wikipedia a couple of years back, as well as earlier this year in my textbook when I took a psychology class at university. When I consider my own observations of the amount of gay people I've encountered in person and observed in the media along with the common sense, estimating 2-3% of the human population being gay seems very reasonable. Figures that go as high as 10% or more seem massively conflated, if you ask me, and are likely indicative of a political agenda rather than a desire for accuracy and truth.

Agreed. Tbh, I actually dislike discussing this topic because it's so loaded with political and emotional baggage. It's scary how politics has infected supposedly objective "research" these days.

Well the scientific community has moved from a desire for objective results to the politically correct idea that scientists have the moral obligation to get the right results.

Agent355 wrote:

Fictional characters can't be positive representations of queer relationships when the relationships are good, but imaginary when their relationships crosses the line and becomes problematic and negative. It's like saying that people shouldn't be upset at "rape=love" tropes in yaoi while also saying that fans should be glad for the gay representation in rapey yaoi.

Fiction is always imaginary, regardless of whether someone finds the story positive or negative, and authors can use fiction for different ends in different stories. Some BL is about fluffy love stories and gay issues, some is about angst-ridden relationship melodrama and emotional trauma, and any given author can write some of both. I don't see anyone claiming that Gengoroh Tagame's My Brother's Husband shouldn't be regarded as an excellent series that is trying to promote positive depictions of gay men and raise gay issues just because Tagame is also famous for a large oeuvre of (explicitly pornographic) stories in which men get brutally gang-raped and sexually tortured by other men.*

Agent355 wrote:

If people are allowed to like problematic relationships in fiction without being accused of liking those relationships in real life, people should be allowed to express dislike for problematic relationships in fiction without being accused of being unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

The issue there is that a lot of the objections are based on the idea that the readers can't distinguish between reality and fantasy; "forceful seduction" stories normalize rape, "domineering love interest" stories normalize domestic abuse, shotabait subtext normalizes child molestation, etc. (But for some reason everyone agrees that fictional murder and bloodshed do not normalize violence...)

When I consider my own observations of the amount of gay people I've encountered in person and observed in the media along with the common sense, estimating 2-3% of the human population being gay seems very reasonable.