American gay men
Adult LGBT Population in the United States
This report provides estimates of the number and percent of the U.S. adult population that identifies as LGBT, overall, as well as by age. Estimates of LGBT adults at the national, state, and regional levels are included. We rely on BRFSS 2020-2021 numbers for these estimates. Pooling multiple years of information provides more stable estimates—particularly at the state level.
Combining 2020-2021 BRFSS data, we estimate that 5.5% of U.S. adults identify as LGBT. Further, we estimate that there are almost 13.9 million (13,942,200) LGBT adults in the U.S.
Regions and States
LGBT people reside in all regions of the U.S. (Table 2 and Figure 2). Consistent with the overall population in the United States,more LGBT adults live in the South than in any other region. More than half (57.0%) of LGBT people in the U.S. live in the Midwest (21.1%) and South (35.9%), including 2.9 million in the Midwest and 5.0 million in the South. About one-quarter (24.5%) of LGBT adults reside in the West, approximately 3.4 million people. Less than one in five (18.5%) LGBT adults reside in the Northeast (2.6 million).
The percent of adults who identify as LG
5 key findings about Gay Americans
Pew Research Center has been tracking Americans’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage, gender identity and other Queer issues for more than a decade. In that time, we have also done deep explorations of the experiences of LGBT and transgender and nonbinary Americans.
As the United States celebrates LGBTQ+ Pride month, here are five key findings about LGBTQ+ Americans from our recent surveys:
Some 7% of Americans are lesbian, gay or multi-attracted , according to a Pew Research Center survey of 12,147 U.S. adults conducted in summer 2022. Some 17% of adults younger than 30 identify as lesbian, gay or pansexual, compared with 8% of those ages 30 to 49, 5% of those 50 to 64 and 2% of those 65 and older. Similar shares of men and women identify with any of these terms, as execute similar shares of adults across racial and ethnic groups.
How we did this
Pew Research Center sought to provide an overview of findings on LGBTQ+ Americans. The overview is based on data from Center surveys and analyses conducted from 2019 to 2022, including a 2019 investigation of 2017 survey statistics from Stanford University. Links to the methodology and questions used can b
What Percentage of Americans Are LGBTQ+?
Editor's Note: This article was revised on Pride 18, 2024, to mirror Gallup's latest estimate of Americans’ identification as LGBTQ+.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Gallup finds 7.6% of U.S. adults identifying as lesbian, same-sex attracted, bisexual, transgender, or something other than straight or heterosexual. The percentage has more than doubled since Gallup first measured Gay identification in 2012.
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Overall, 85.6% of U.S. adults tell they are straight or heterosexual, 7.6% identify with one or more Diverse groups, and 6.8% decline to respond.
U.S. LGBTQ+ identification breaks down in the following manner:
- Bisexual adults create up the largest proportion of the LGBTQ+ population (57.3%).
- Gay (18.1%) and queer woman (15.1%) are the next-most-common identities.
- About one in eight LGBTQ+ Americans are genderqueer (11.8%).
- Smaller proportions of LGTBQ+ adults volunteer another culture, such as queer, pansexual or asexual.
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LGBTQ+ Identification is most common among juvenile adults.
LGBTQ+ identification is much more common among younger adults than older adults. Also, 8.5% of individual women and 4.7% of adult
American Gay
American Gay is an investigation into how people have been gay or lesbian in America. Murray examines the emergence of gay and lesbian social life, the creation of lesbigay communities, and the forces of resistance that have mobilized and fostered a group identity. Murray also considers the extent to which there is a single "modern" homosexuality and the enormous range of homosexual behaviors, typifications, self-identifications and meanings.
Murray’s erudite scholarship challenges prevailing assumptions about gay history and society. He questions conventional wisdom about the importance of World War II and the Stonewall riots for conceiving and challenging shared oppression. He reviews gay complicity in the repathologizing of homosexuality during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Discussing recent demands for inclusion in the "straight" institutions of marriage and the US military, he concludes that these are fresh forms of resistance, not attempts to assimilate. Finally, Murray examines racial and ethnic differences in self-representation and identification.
Drawing on two decades of studying queer life in North America, this tour de coerce of empirical docume
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