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Written by Lisa Neff, Staff writer
Apr 21, 2011
The population identifying as gay and lesbian in the United States is about 4 million adults, according to a demographer who has long studied the issue, along with nuances of analyzing and calculating numbers about the gay community.
Demographer Gary Gates of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California-Los Angeles estimated that gays and lesbians represent about 1.7 percent of the adult U.S. population.
The percentage was derived from studies that asked participants about their sexual orientation, and it was based on the number of people who identify as gay or lesbian, not the number who have engaged in same-sex activity.
The estimate of people who have engaged or experimented in same-sex activity – heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals – is about 19 million people or 8.2 percent of the population, according to Gates’ paper, “How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender?”
The researcher put the estimate of the bisexual population at about 4 million people or 1.8 percent of the adult population and, citing other studies, estimated the transgender population at 700,000 people or .3 percent of the adult population.
The population estimate for the LGBT community in the United States, then, is 8,700,000 people.
“That’s equivalent to the population of New Jersey,” Gates observed, while noting that the number of adults who have engaged in same-sex activity is about the same as the population of Texas.
Other findings in Gates’ study:
There are slightly more adults who identify as bisexual than as lesbian or gay.
Women are more likely to identify as bisexual than men.
Nearly 25.6 million people, or 11 percent of the adult population, acknowledge some same-sex sexual attraction.
For decades, pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s assessment that one in 10 men are “more or less exclusively homosexual” guided population estimates for the community.
The population estimate, in more recent years using other research methods, has fluctuated: two in 10, three in 10, five in 10. But the numbers always have been subject to dispute, especially by pro-gay and anti-gay forces with political agendas.
“Lots of Americans have no idea how many people are gay or lesbian,” said Gates, in a statement issued along with his study. “A 2002 Gallup poll suggested that one in six Americans had no estimate, and those who did have an opinion put the figure at a whopping 20 percent.”
Gates, in discussing his findings, emphasized the need for more research and more pointed surveys. His eight-page paper drew conclusions about the LGBT population, but much of the writing was devoted to “challenges in measuring the LGBT community.”
“Assumptions about people are flimsy; numbers are solid,” Gates said. “The reality of our political system is that you don’t really count unless you are counted. So it’s time to stop believing an old estimate and making an accurate count.”
Later in its cycle of reporting results from the 2010 census, the U.S. Census Bureau will release population numbers for households with same-sex couples. Such statistics, gay rights advocates have stressed, can be informational but tend to under-estimate the population.
The bureau is still considering whether to ask about sexual orientation in its ongoing American Community Survey, which provides an in-depth look at many aspects of the American population.
