Anna Rawhiti-Connell reflects on the week that was.

As a teenager in the mid to late 90s, I vividly remember a statistical “urban legend” doing the rounds. 

“15% of the population is gay, so… [insert number based on how many people were in the classroom] must be gay.” I have no idea where it came from, but we didn’t tend to spout that line to celebrate or embrace that “fact”.

It was a less enlightened time, just 10 years after the Homosexual Law Reform Act was passed. There are 35 years between the release of The Children’s Hour in 1961 and my high school years at an all-girls Catholic high school, but at times, the torment inflicted on some of the women and girls at school hewed extremely close to the plot of the Shirley MacLaine/Audrey Hepburn classic. It’s maybe no accident on behalf of the teaching staff that we were sent out into the world having been forced to study Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” during our final year.

By the time I made it to Auckland in the mid 2000s, the 15% figure was no longer something I thought about but instead assumed I was just living and encountering. I went from a mid-sized, rural-adjacent city where I maybe knew 1.7 people who openly identified as LGBTQI+ to an urban megalopolis where my boss, my boss’s boss, several colleagues, and in no time at all, many close friends identified as being under the broad umbrella of being queer. I worked in the arts and lived in a flat I could not afford in Grey Lynn, and you can read as many cliches and stereotypes as you like into that if you wish; however, proximity to queerness has remained my fortunate reality across many different jobs, social circles and neighbourhoods.

You live where you live and work where you work, and that shapes your perception of reality, fortunate or otherwise. I was often reminded on trips to other parts of the country and my involvement with some of the country’s more historically conservative leisure activities (men’s rugby), that “not a second glance or thought” when seeing same-sex attraction or relationships in the wild was not a universally applied standard of behaviour. It was, and still is, a good reminder that there are plenty of places where stigma remains part of the experience of being queer. 

The 2023 Census data on sexuality and gender, released this week, surprised me. Admittedly, that’s based on my perception of my reality, but the headlines about Auckland, at 4.9%, having less than half the proportion of people who identified as LGBTIQ+ as Wellington, were a shock. The figure changed to 12% for the Waitematā Local Board area, Auckland’s tight urban city centre, but as far as I can gauge, there’s no real hard statistical reason why Welly would, to quote the Reddit thread that popped off with similar levels of surprise and commensurate theorising, be “gayer” than Auckland.

Overall, one in 20 New Zealanders identify as LGBTQI+. 15.6% of the population opted “not to say”. A global 2021 Ipsos survey (New Zealand was not part of it) found 80% of people identify as heterosexual, 3% as gay, lesbian or homosexual, 4% as bisexual, 1% as pansexual or omnisexual, 1% as asexual, 1% as “other”. 11% didn’t know or didn’t want to say. 

Without getting all “Head of Audience” on you (the job I spend the bulk of my time doing at The Spinoff, which involves spending a lot of quality time with data), there are always going to be a range of issues with data collection of any kind. I know that when we tweak certain questions or cut data differently when doing research, we get different statistically significant outcomes. If you really want to get into the weeds, Stats NZ has a lot of info on their site, but they acknowledge that some of the terminology used is not how some LGBTQI+ people choose to identify. The data used to fill the holes of nonparticipation, like the Stats NZ household surveys and the New Zealand Health Survey, are interviewer-administered, compared with the Census, which is a self-complete survey. All of these things can impact how people might respond.

Tabby Besley, managing director of support and education charity InsideOUT, told the Herald that “self-reporting of sexuality, orientation and identities in the census could be lower than the actual figure.” She noted “low participation rates, particularly for youngsters, and said many may feel uncomfortable or unable to list their true identity.”  It’s also the first time the questions have been asked, and there’s no prior data to compare it with for consistency. 

The Reddit thread offered up what we might call more “attitudinal” or cultural theories. There are different cultural and ethnic norms, which echo some of the described experiences of living in “the ‘ethnic closet’”. There are observations about the difference between sexual behaviour and the way you might identify. Maybe you don’t want to tick one box. You may not want to “tell the government” about who you love or sleep with. According to a 2019 University of Auckland study, one in 20 men and more than 1 in 6 women reported same-gender sexual attraction at least once in their lifetime. This reduced to 4.3% of men and 8.6% of women when asked about the last 12 months. Which box do you then put yourself in? 

Is it that Wellington (the figure quoted is for the area excluding Porirua and the Hutts) really has more people who identify as LGBTQI+ than the Auckland region, or is that where you live, and a range of other factors, impact your propensity to answer questions openly? You live where you live and that shapes your perception of your reality, which probably includes your sense of safety and acceptance.

There are enough awful stats about homelessness and mental health to give the data meaningful use in accounting for the services needed by the LGBTIQ+ community. It is, as many have said, just good to be “seen”. It is better to have started down this road than rely on a dated and speciously applied teenage urban legend, but as with all research, it’s also wise to embrace your inner nerd and read the fine print.

This week’s episode of Behind the Story

What have readers spent the most time reading this week?

• Burning up the charts was Alex Casey’s account of watching Christopher Luxon watch the World of Wearable Art 
• Rupert O’Brien offers an opinion about the real reason behind Act’s push to redefine the Treaty principles
• Fran Barclay reviews New World’s $10 lunch deal
• Hayden Donnell tries to find an economist who backs Nicola Willis’s CGT stance
• Claire Mabey tells the tale of the NZ journal that commissioned then spiked a critical review of its co-editor’s book

Comments of the week

On Help me Hera: All my friends are whingers and moaners

• “A friend of mine used to Love to complain to his husband about work on his drive home, so his husband instituted a physical border to the complaining – he could complain Until a specific offramp on the motorway, and then it had to be done. Maybe if you still want to provide your friends with a chance to vent you could gamify it a bit and give everyone 2 mins on the clock, or until you finish your first wine to let it out, and then it’s on to bigger and better things. :)”

On How I became the 193rd best pinballer in New Zealand

• “There were some seriously good players there. There was one guy I’d see around, early thirties, worked at a local record store, denims, long hair, and a moustache. He blew my mind the first time I saw a ball go down the drain, start rolling behind the flippers and off the table, and he thumped the bottom of the table just right so that the ball re-entered the playfield. Once he put a dollar in, played for an hour, and then give me the table to play with three credits on it (he started with one).”

Pick up where this leaves off

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