Significant obstacles stand in the way of analyzing the integration of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) faculty members into the U.S. professoriate. Whereas the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other agencies collect voluminous, valuable data on race, gender, and ethnicity, few data exist for the GLBT community. Indeed, the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group that works to increase public understanding of GLBT issues, cautions on its Web site that the data it collects on university and governmental positions "represent its best efforts to track laws and policies that relate to sexual orientation and gender identity. Because of the proprietary nature of human-resource information, and because no centralized place exists where laws and policies must be reported, some entities that have inclusive policies for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Americans may not appear [in the data]." Although the Human Rights Campaign frequently updates its data, GLBT protections are sometimes revoked after their passage, so the data may include some policies that are no longer in effect. The final report from the American Anthropological Association's Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Issues in Anthropology--one of the most significant attempts to date to gauge the status of GLBT faculty members--offers similar comments on the difficulty of securing accurate information about the kinds, degree, and prevalence of discrimination against such faculty. The report returns repeatedly to the importance of collecting and comparing narratives about GLBT faculty experiences so that significant patterns can be identified as real, albeit often subtle, discrimination rather than dismissed as the product of individuals' imaginations. (Contains 4 notes.)