LGBTQ+
Just over 7% of the US adult population identifies as LGBTQ, according to a Gallup poll published in February 2023. This figure has risen with each passing generation, with 20% of Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2004) identifying as LGBTQ, compared to 11.2% of Millennials, 3.3% of Generation X, 2.7% of Baby Boomers, and 1.7% of those born before the end of World War II.
A April 2023 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found that a quarter of US high school students identify as homosexual, bisexual, or ‘questioning’, a figure that has more than doubled since 2015. Based on data collected in 2021, the CDC’s report found that 72.4% of high schoolers identify as heterosexual, down from almost 90% in 2015; 3.2% identify as gay or lesbian, 12% identify as bisexual, and 9% as ‘other’ or ‘questioning’. Girls were more likely than boys to place themselves in all three categories, with five times as many female students considering themselves bisexual (20% vs. 4%), and four times as many (13.7% vs. 3.7%) listing themselves in the ‘other’ category.
The number of transgender Americans, which the CDC survey did not measure, has also exploded. Fewer than 0.05% of the Silent Generation (born between 1928 and 1945) identified as transgender in the Gallup survey, compared to 1.9% of Generation Z, an almost forty-fold increase.
Some commentators argue that increased acceptance of alternative sexualities has made each successive generation more comfortable with coming out as LGBTQ. Others claim that “social contagion” – in which young people embrace LGBTQ identities in order to fit in with their peers – is responsible. Adolescent girls with transgender friends were more likely to come out as transgender themselves. The study also linked heavy social media use to transgender identification.
Although more and more high school students are embracing alternative sexualities, fewer and fewer are sexually active. According to CDC data, the number of students who have ever had sex has fallen from 47% in 2011 to 30% in 2021, while the number who said they were currently sexually active fell from 34% to 21% in that same period.
In 1993, the authors of Sex in America gave three primary reasons why the LGBTQ community is hard to define and track, even by today’s standards. First, some people change their behaviors during their lifetime; second, there is “no one set of sexual desires or self-identification that uniquely defines homosexuality. Is it sexual desire for a person of the same gender, is it thinking of yourself as homosexual, or is it some combination of these behaviors that make a person a homosexual?” A third reason, they wrote, “is that homosexual behavior is not easily measured … Even though the recent struggles of gay men and lesbians to gain acceptance have had an effect…the history of persecution has a lasting effect both on what people are willing to say about their sexual behavior and on what they actually do.”
Sexologist Alfred Kinsey reported that 37 percent of the white men he interviewed had at least one sexual experience with another man; of these, 10 percent had only homosexual experience for any three-year period of their lives between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five. Four percent of those who had at least one sexual experience with another man had homosexual encounters exclusively from adolescence onward. Among women, Kinsey said 13 percent had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm. Kinsey’s number of exclusive homosexuals was 4 percent.
The authors of Sex in America found that 5.5 percent of women thought having sex with a woman was appealing, 4 percent were sexually attracted to women, and less than 2 percent had sex with a woman in the past year. About 4 percent had sex with another woman after age eighteen. For men, 6 percent were attracted to other men, 2 percent had sex with a man in the past year and a little over 5 percent said they had homosexual sex at least once after age eighteen. When asked about sexuality, 1.4 percent of women said they thought of themselves as homosexual or bisexual, and 2.8 percent of men.
A recent study of changes in American adults’ reported same-sex experiences and attitudes found that, by 2014, the number of US adults who had at least one same-sex partner since the age of 18 had increased to 8.7 percent of women and 8.2 percent of men. Those reporting having both homosexual and heterosexual relationships in 2014 had risen to 7.7 percent.
These increases were accompanied by increasing acceptance of same-sex sexuality. By 2014, 49% of American adults believed that same-sex sexual activity was ‘not wrong at all,’ up from 11% in 1973 and 13% in 1990.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
