These statistics fly in the face of what many people would have you believe — that bisexuals are an insignificant subgroup of the LGBT community that doesn’t merit having their different perspective recognized. Clearly, if the LGBT community wants to maximize its political muscle then it needs to give greater weight to these findings and look for ways to activate these often hidden members of our community and provide ways to better serve bisexuals.

Interesting and informative passages pulled out of Ellyn Ruthstrom’s piece “Getting Your Numbers Straight, So to Speak” from today’s Huffington Post on the very odd media coverage the William’s Institute Report has been getting. Ms. Ruthstrom is the current president of the Bisexual Resource Center (BRC), which along with the American Institute of Bisexuality (AIB) and BiNet USA are the three large nationwide non-profit organizations that speak up for all the queer-identified people including those who identify as bisexual, pansexual, fluid, no-labels, omnisexual, ambisexual et. al. that fall under the “B” in LGBT in the United States.

Recent headlines about “how many gay people there are” sadly demonstrated once again that no good deed goes unpunished. The latest statistics from The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School should have been extremely validating for the bisexual community’s significance within the greater movement for equality across the sexuality and gender identity spectrum. The analysis was not only informative but also inclusive. But once again, the bisexual population was erased from much of the coverage, another lost opportunity for genuine discussion about sexual orientation

the findings estimate that 3.5 percent of adults (8 million) in the U.S. identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, with bisexuals representing a slight majority within the group as a whole: 1.8 percent as opposed to 1.7 percent who identify as lesbian or gay. (And another 700,000 are transgender, let’s not omit.)

The Associated Press led with the statistic that there are approximately 4 million gays and lesbians in the U.S. What, the other 4 million bisexuals were just too insignificant to mention?

When these statistics are juxtaposed against the recent report of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, “Bisexual Invisibility: Impacts and Recommendations”the seriousness of neglecting bisexual lives and perspectives is evident.

Another really odd thing about the media coverage, especially in the LGBT media itself, is how it strangely miss-represents the report’s actual findings and falsely implies that the long accepted number of 10% being LGBT is too high. That isn’t true. The report actually reconfirms those figures and simply comments on the breakdown as well as showing that for the first time people are becoming less nervous about admitting their actual sexual orientations and are starting to living openly. What the report says is that now between 8% and 11% of the population (or rounding it off about 10%) actually will admit that it seems they are not actually straight and that of that number the great news is that around 3.7% is slowly emerging from the closet and are living their lives openly.