A recent press release from Kaiser Health News claims cultural changes are apparently motivating more Americans to come to terms or be more comfortable with their sexual orientation – to the point that an increasing number of individuals are “coming out” in some capacity.
While many sources have maintained figures from the Kinsey Report drawing on data collected in the 1940s that claimed as many as ten percent of Americans were somewhere in the LGBTQ family, later surveys have disputed that figure, placing it anywhere between one percent and just below four percent.
A story carried by USA Today says the number of American adults who identify as LGBTQ has risen to a record 7.1 percent, and younger people are at the forefront of the increase.
The statistics for the estimate come from a Gallup Poll, and place the increase at double the percentage from 2012 when Gallup first explored sexual orientation and gender identity and above last year’s poll that showed 5.6 percent of adults identify as LGBTQ. In a 2017 poll, that number was 4.5 percent.
That increase is significant, Gallup Senior Editor Jeff Jones told USA Today. “I think it speaks to society changing in terms of acceptance of people with different sexual orientations and gender identities and people’s willingness to identify that way,” he said in said in the interview dated February 17.
Gallup found that the increase is due to ”high LGBT self-identification, particularly as bisexual, among Generation Z adults,” who are 18 to 25. It asked more than 12,000 American adults how they identified during telephone interviews conducted last year.
It found that younger adults are much more likely to identify as LGBTQ than older generations. More than 1 in 5, or 21 percent, of Gen Z individuals identify as LGBTQ. That’s nearly double the number of Millennials, who are 26 to 41, at 10.5 percent, and nearly five times the proportion of Gen Xers, who are 42 to 57, at 4.2 percent.