10% was a kind of a political decision of gay activists in the '

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/08/137057974/-institute-of-medicine-finds-lgbt-health-research-gaps-in-us

Gary J. Gates, the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, specializes in law and public policy related to sexual orientation. He's co-author of the book "The Gay and Lesbian Atlas" and he's with us from NPR West in Southern California.

Judy Bradford, director of the Center for Population Research in LGBT Health. And co-chair of Boston's Fenway Institute, which advocates for LGBT health. And she joins us from member station WBUR in Boston, Massachusetts.

MARTIN: So, Professor Gates, let's start with you and that 10 percent figure. You argued that that percentage was adopted for political reasons, that Kinsey never claimed to have the means to make this scientific estimate. So tell me a little bit, if you would, about why you think that figure was politically attractive.

GATES: Well, I'll start by saying that I'm not the only one who believes this. Also, the Kinsey Institute has - which is the legacy of Kinsey - has stated very clearly that their view is that this was a kind of a political decision of gay activists in the '70s. They needed at that time to convince people that the gay people actually existed and in fact that they were kind of everywhere. And they took that rather obscure passage from a Kinsey book, which was never intended to be an estimate of the number of gay people in the United States and kind of adopted it for political purposes. It was sort of large enough that it made a difference, but not so large that it overly threatened people.