There’s no question that public attitudes towards the LGBT community have shifted dramatically
in a relatively short amount of time.
Just last year, the number of married same-sex couples in the US has tripled.
To see how this shift has changed LGBT demographics, we asked Dr. Gary Gates of the Williams Institute
to tell us more.
What percentage of the U.S. population today would identify as LGBT based on your data?
So the best estimates that we have for the percentage of the population in the US that
identify as LGBT are around 4%.
Various surveys range from roughly of 3 to 5% in most surveys.
Well if you look at identity as your measurement, um, it’s around, most surveys are around
four percent.
Um, three to five percent, you do get occasionally some surveys that are higher than that.
One interesting thing about those surveys is among younger people, it’s always substantially
higher.
So for instance in...in the Gallup survey, if you’re under age 30, it’s well over
six percent identifying as LGBT, but if you’re over 30, it’s under four percent.
So I suspect that in the fairly near future, uh, those numbers are going to continue to
go up.
But if you use these other measures like sexual behavior or...sexual..uh...or your attractions
to..to either...um, people of similar gender to you or different gender to you, um you
get much higher numbers.
Um if you ask people if they’ve ever had same sex sexual encounter, you usually get
numbers in the eight to nine percent range.
And if you ask if they have any kind of attractions that are beyond...um...different sex attractions,
so any sort of same sex attractions, you often get numbers, uh well over 10 percent.
Wow.
I mean that’s a huge difference in just how you ask the question.
and do you think those numbers are gonna change over time?
They have already.
Um in survey... we don’t have a lot of older surveys that asks these kinds of questions.
But certainly if we look at some surveys in the early 90s, um, sexual orientation identity,
so identifying at that point was usually just lesbian, gay or bisexual, it was only in about
the two percent range.
So it’s more than doubled in the last ten years.
So are there any uh...racial socioeconomic religious correlation to be found in the identity
data?
Well yes I think one of the interesting things there’s a stereotype for instance that around
racial, race and ethnicity that uh racial and ethnic minorities would be kind of less
likely to identify as LGBT because uh of more socially conservative environments in some
cases, um more broad social stigma so perhaps uh an unwillingness to kind of add to my stigmatization
by identifying as LGBT.
But in fact um the recent Gallup data which is the largest sample of of LGBT people we
have as far as I know in the world from a population based sampling um most racial and
ethnic minorities have higher proportion identifying as LGBT right now.
And it turns out that the reason for that is is that younger people are much more likely
to self identify as LGBT than older people and racial and ethnic minorities in this country
are younger than white people.
And that skew in the age it actually explains quite a bit of the difference in the identity
patterns and so.
But overall it’s no longer accurate in the United States to say there are big differences
in identity by race and ethnicity um.
we see prevalence to be very similar uh across racial ethnic categories.
Do those same kind of attitudes play out over the same sex marriage argument as well or
the same sex marriage discussion rather?
Well certainly yes, well they attract again communities that are more supportive of lcof
marriage equality tend to have higher percentages of LGBT pop you know people identifying as
LGBT.
So if you look at states, you know if you look at uh percent LGBT among states um the
northeast and the West tend to have higher proportions and i think that, it’s not surprising
that those places are also then places that have more supportive laws like marriage equality.
Um and I think those two things go hand in hand.you in order to pass supportive laws
uh around LGBT, you have to have a fairly visible already a fairly visible active LGBT
community uh to promote the law.
Right.
And you mentioned states in the west, in the north...in the northwest, what..(pause) what
states have the largest collections of people who identify as LGBT, and why would..why...why
would that be?
Well and again there few questions largest number or largest percentage
Right- And largest number are basically just states
with a lot of people Right-
So you know California, Texas, New York.
those states tend to have the largest number and the same thing when we look at cities.
but if we look at percentages again places with the highest percentages tend to be the
states you would expect so uh new england states, and the west coast, California, Oregon,
Washington um. in general those are the places that have the highest proportions of LGBT
people and if you look at at for instance Gallup recently did some analysis of metropolitan
areas and that not surprising San Francisco was ranked highly.
But I think one of the interesting things to note from that was that Salt Lake City
Yea- Made the top ten of metro areas and and and
that goes back to a comment I made earlier about this relationship between laws and supportive
laws and LGBT visibility.
It I suspected that LGBT visibility was changing even in conservative places like Utah and
certainly in Salt Lake City and and you see that they are the first state in,
I think it’s seven years to pass a broad based anti-discrimination law that included
sexual orientation and gender identity and i think those two statistics aren’t are
highly related.
um I think that the reason that happened was that visibility in places like Salt Lake City
got large enough that they could really make the case for those laws and as I said it showed
up in the Gallup figures.
Do you think that’s — uh kind of a chicken and egg situation where, is it the population
is there and therefore it Right
fosters the law, or is it that the law can then foster
It’s Silence.
or an opening for that law fosters an increase in population
It’s absolutely both that um Some underlying social acceptance that allows LGBT people
to be more visible certainly helps in the beginnings of getting better laws um.
But once laws are passed and certainly um we have evidence at the Williams institute
we’ve done some studies showing that after marriage equality is passed in a state, even
if it’s done through uh a judicial uh you know a court ruling that support for marriage
for same sex couples goes up in the state and that probably that increases the visibility
of same sex couples in the state um and you know probably LGBT people generally as well.
so the two factors to go hand in hand and you’re exactly right its definitely a chicken
and egg situation.
With most of the country having already legalized same-sex marriage, the upcoming Supreme Court
ruling seems like a foregone conclusion.
But how that will change the face of the LGBT population, and how global perceptions will
shift even further, is yet to be seen.
A huge thanks to Gary Gates at UCLA’S Williams Institute for joining us on TestTube News
today.
If you’d like to learn about more awesome research coming out of UCLA, check out this
video about how our DNA may have a big effect on our relationships.
Thanks for watching!
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