There Are More Gay Millennials Than Any Other Generation Before, Report Finds
According to a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 7% of U.S. adults aged 18 to 35 identify as LGBT.
There are no significant differences across races in LGBT identity, but there are modest religious and political differences. More than one in ten (12%) religiously unaffiliated millennials identify as LGBT, compared to six percent of white mainline Protestant, six percent of Hispanic Catholic, five percent of Hispanic Protestant, five percent of black Protestant, two percent of white Catholic, and just one percent of white evangelical Protestant millennials.
Democratic millennials are significantly more likely to identify as LGBT than Republican millennials (10% vs. 2%).
Even those millennials who don't identify as LGBT are more in tune with the spectrum of sexual attraction.
Millennial women are twice as likely as millennial men to say they are sexually attracted to someone of the same gender (14% vs. 7%, respectively).
Among millennial women who do not identify as lesbian or bisexual, 8% say they are sexually attracted to other women.
And despite differences in religion, social status and political affiliation, the vast majority of respondents oppose discrimination against LGBT people and support laws to that end.
These new statistics are in contrast to previous studies of the U.S.'s LGBT population: According to CDC's National Health Interview Survey from 2014, only 1.6% of adults identify as gay or lesbian, and 0.7% identify as bisexual.
But that survey, involving face-to-face interviews and follow-up telephone queries, offered no confidentiality. According to a Williams Institute report from 2011, 3.8 % of American adults identify themselves being in the LGBT community.
Even by the Williams Institute standards, millennials are nearly twice as likely to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans compared to the adult population of the country as a whole.
Since we don't think there's anything in the water making more young people queer, we have to assume they're just more comfortable claiming their identity.
That, at least, makes us hopeful for the future.
