A recent study investigating U.S. adult’s sexual orientation identification found that 7.2% of their study participants identified as something other than heterosexual.
A global analytics and advice firm, Gallup, conducted over 10,000 interviews with U.S. adults asking participants whether they identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something else. Their results indicated that 7% identified as LGBT, 86% identified as straight or heterosexual, and 7% declined to answer their survey questions.
Their findings suggest that after noticeable increases in 2020 and 2021, LGBT+ identification steadied in 2022. Similar to their findings from previous years, Gallup found that more than half of the U.S. LGBT adults identified as bisexual, one in five identified as gay, one in seven identified as lesbian, and less than one in 10 identified as transgender. Roughly 1-2% of LGBT adults – 0.1% of all U.S. adults – identified as queer, pansexual or asexual.
Additionally, as per past study findings, Gallup found younger adults, those aged 18 to 25, were most likely to identify as LGBT. Of the adults identifying as LGBT, 19.7% were members of Generation Z, 11.2% were millennials, and less than 3.3% were among older generations.
In short, Gallup’s findings suggest that LGBT identification has become much more common in the U.S. and that the percentage of adults identifying as LGBT has doubled since they first conducted this survey a decade ago. They expect U.S.’s LGBT adult population to continue to grow in the coming years, so long as the rate of younger adults identifying as LGBT also increases.
