If you’re a New School student, chances are you think that The New School is pretty gay. Just how gay is The New School, you ask? I surveyed 100 New School students to find out just how gay we really are.

Out of the 100 students surveyed, 62 self-identified as straight, 17 as bisexual, 8 as gay, 9 as queer, 4 as pansexual and there were absolutely no lesbians. That’s right. Not a single lesbian in the house.

I handed out surveys at different New School buildings at various times of the day to get a strong representation of The New School student body. Of the students surveyed, 40 were from Parsons, 30 were from Lang, 5 from Social Research, 5 from Mannes, 2 from Jazz, 11 from Drama and 5 were from Public Engagement.

My overarching question, what is sexuality and can it ever be measured?

In the survey, I asked students to mark where their sexuality would fall on a spectrum between straight and gay. To be honest, not only was it hilarious to see some of the responses, it was a little perplexing. For example, how is it possible that out of 100 students, there were absolutely no lesbians? I know for a fact that there are several lesbians here at the New School. So the question is, how do they label themselves? Queer, maybe? Pansexual? Is there some sort of stigma against labeling yourself a lesbian as opposed to queer?

Either way, it was a little heartbreaking to find out that out of 100 students, 69 of whom are female, not a single one labeled herself a lesbian. Maybe lesbians aren’t real. Maybe they’re like unicorns and they only live in our hopes and dreams (OK, maybe just my hopes and dreams). I really hope they exist, not because of my own selfish desires, but because, well, they’re the L in LGBTQ. Without lesbians it would just be GBTQ, which sounds like a nightmare of a subway line.

One of the more interesting findings was that many of the people who self-identified as ‘straight’ marked a spot on the line between straight and gay sometimes two inches away from the straight end. In other words, they marked their sexuality at a spot that is, at least in my mind, bisexual territory.

For example, this girl.

Then there were those who were a little more self-assured. Like these two.

Then there were the more confused ones, like this girl:

Even I’m confused by this! What?!

As for the self-identified ‘straight’ students who marked a spot well into ‘bisexual’ or ‘bi-curious’ territory ( 15 of the 62 did this), they left me with more questions than answers. For example, how is the one on the left ‘straight’ and the one on the right ‘bisexual’?

Obviously no survey is perfect, 100 students cannot be a flawless representation of the entire student body. Sexuality isn’t concrete and maybe there should have been a ‘bi-curious’ option included in the survey for more accurate results. However the survey does reveal that trying to get a concrete number of people who identify as LGBTQ is a very hard thing to accomplish because of the fact that sexuality is so fluid.

Out of the students who participated in the survey, 38 percent of them identify as LGBTQ—that’s nearly ten times the national average. According to a 2016 Gallup poll, only 4.1 percent of the United States population identifies as LGBTQ, with millennials being the gayest at 7.3 percent.

So, despite all the questions this survey raised, based on the results—we’re pretty queer folk here at The New School.