EDDIE51
I think you're mistaken in your belief that the so-called 'gay lobby' tried to convince anyone that one in four people are gay.
I suspect you may be remembering this story:
Perplexing news for the single women of this country's great capital. According to a survey commissioned by The London Paper, one of the free sheets that is handed out on the Tube, slightly more than one in four of the men in London is homosexual.
This cheering snippet of information was buried in a survey carried out especially for Valentines Day on the subject of the love life of your average Londoner.
Question two, rather oddly phrased, ran: "If you had to choose, which gender would you be more interested in?" The results ran thus: three per cent of the women surveyed were lesbian, three per cent professed to be bisexual and 94 per cent preferred men. But of the men, only 71 per cent were romantically interested in women with a whopping 26 per cent preferring each other (the remaining three per cent being conspicuously easy going in the matter).
A call or two to discover the source of this information and thus decide whether to take it seriously leads me to Amit Chakravarty at an outfit called Iris PR, who tells me they commissioned the survey from Skopos, a market research consultancy based in the City.
"It looks as if Skopos used a sample of 400 Londoners aged between 18 and 45. And I can see from the information that I have here that only 120 people answered that question: 55 men and 65 women."
So hardly a statistically significant sample. A spokesman for Stonewall, a campaigning group for gay rights, laughs when I ask him if it can possibly be true that more than one in four male Londoners is homosexual? "Government statistics have it that six per cent of men and women nationally are gay – but that's an estimate because it's not a question that is on the census. I'm not aware of any specific statistics for London, except that the numbers are accepted to be higher."