America and lgbtq
What’s Behind the Rapid Go up in LGBTQ Identity?
Newsletter Protest 6, 2025
Daniel A. Cox, Jae Grace, Avery Shields
Since 2012, Gallup has tracked the size of America’s LGBTQ population. For the first few years, there was not much news to report. The percentage of Americans who identified as gay, lesbian, attracted to both genders, transgender, or queer was relatively low and inching up slowly year over year. Recently, the pace has sped up. Gallup’s newest report recorded the single largest one-year boost in LGBTQ identity. In 2024, nearly one in ten (9.3 percent) Americans identify as LGBTQ.
The constant rise in LGBTQ individuality among the public is worth noting, but it’s not the most significant part of the story. Most of the uptick in LGBTQ identity over the past decade is due to a dramatic increase among young adults, particularly young women. In less than a decade, the percentage of juvenile women who identify as LGBTQ has more than tripled.
The gender gap in LGBTQ identity has exploded as well. A decade earlier, young women were only slightly more likely to identify as LGBTQ than young men. For instance, in 2015, 10 percent of young women and six percent of young men identified as
LGBTQ Rights
The ACLU has a long history of defending the LGBTQ community. We brought our first LGBTQ rights case in 1936. Founded in 1986, the Jon L. Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović LGBTQ & HIV Project brings more LGBTQ rights cases and advocacy initiatives than any other national organization does and has been counsel in seven of the nine LGBTQ rights cases that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided. With our reach into the courts and legislatures of every state, there is no other organization that can match our document of making progress both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion.
The ACLU’s current priorities are to end discrimination, harassment and violence toward gender nonconforming people, to close gaps in our federal and state civil rights laws, to prevent protections against discrimination from being undermined by a license to discriminate, and to shield LGBTQ people in and from the criminal legal system.
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For non-LGBTQ issues, please contact your local ACLU affiliate.
The ACLU Lesbian Gay Pansexual Transgender Project seeks to create a just world for all LGBTQ people regardless of race or income. Thr
LGBTQ+ Identification in U.S. Rises to 9.3%
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Gallup’s latest update on LGBTQ+ identification finds 9.3% of U.S. adults identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual person, transgender or something other than heterosexual in 2024. This represents an raise of more than a percentage signal versus the prior estimate, from 2023. Longer term, the figure has nearly doubled since 2020 and is up from 3.5% in 2012, when Gallup first measured it.
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LGBTQ+ identification is increasing as younger generations of Americans come in adulthood and are much more likely than older generations to say they are something other than heterosexual. More than one in five Gen Z adults -- those born between 1997 and 2006, who were between the ages of 18 and 27 in 2024 -- detect as LGBTQ+. Each older generation of adults, from millennials to the Silent Generation, has successively lower rates of identification, down to 1.8% among the oldest Americans, those born before 1946.
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LGBTQ+ identification rates among young people contain also increased, from an average 18.8% of Gen Z adults in 2020 through 2022 to an average of 22.7% over the past two years.
Gallup has
The American LGBTQ Rights Movement: An Introduction
Files
Download Packed Text (50.5 MB)
Download Chapter 1 The Beginnings (3.9 MB)
Download Chapter 2 The Homophile Movement (4.9 MB)
Download Chapter 3 Lgbtq+ Liberation (2.8 MB)
Download Chapter 4 Pride In Diversity (2.1 MB)
Download Chapter 5 Response To Adversity (2.5 MB)
Download Chapter 6 The AIDS Era (3.5 MB)
Download Chapter 7 The LGBTQ Rights Movement (2.8 MB)
Download Epilogue Battlefronts (2.0 MB)
Abstract
The American LGBTQ Rights Movement: An Introduction is a peer-reviewed chronological survey of the LGBTQ fight for equal rights from the turn of the 20th century to the early 21st century. Illustrated with historical photographs, the book beautifully reveals the heroic people and key events that shaped the American LGBTQ rights movement. The book includes personal narratives to capture the lived experience from each era, as good as details of inherent organizations, texts, and court cases that defined LGBTQ activism and advocacy.
Disciplines
History | Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Keywords
Lesbian, Gay, Attracted to both genders, Tra
Adult LGBT Population in the United States
This report provides estimates of the number and percent of the U.S. elder 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 data provides more stable estimates—particularly at the declare level.
Combining 2020-2021 BRFSS data, we estimate that 5.5% of U.S. adults determine 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. reside 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 stay in the Northeast (2.6 million).
The percent of adults who identify as LGBT