If you were asked to estimate the percentage of Americans who are LGBTQ, what would you say? Over the last few decades, I’ve included this question on surveys and have found that people’s responses are all over the map; however, the single most common number I hear about LGBTQ people is 10%. How did so many people arrive at this number for the LGBTQ population? Many of them attribute it to the pioneering sexuality research of Dr. Alfred Kinsey from the 1940s. Of the thousands of American men that Kinsey surveyed, about 10% were either predominately or exclusively gay, according to where they fell on his famous Kinsey Scale. While Kinsey was the first to identify the percentage of the population that is gay, his methods have long been criticized because the sample he collected was not representative of the U.S. population and he oversampled from the gay community. His data were also collected more than seven decades ago at a time when homosexuality was criminalized in much of the country and many people were unwilling to disclose their sexual orientation. So how have things changed over time, and what do the LGBTQ community numbers look like today?
The Answer Depends on How You Define Sexual Orientation
Before we dive into the data, it’s important to step back and think about how best to ask the question. Specifically, should you ask whether people identify as a member of the LGBTQ community? Should you ask whether people have same-sex attractions? Or should you ask whether people have actually had same-sex experiences? Sexual identity, attraction, and behavior are all different things—and they don’t necessarily always line up in the way that you might expect. For example, there are many people who identify as heterosexual who report having arousing same-sex fantasies and, sometimes, intimate physical encounters with the same sex. I’ve seen this in my own research on sexual fantasies. I surveyed more than 4,000 Americans about their sexual fantasies for my book Tell Me What You Want and found that among persons who identified as exclusively heterosexual, about half of the women and one-quarter of the men said that they’d had arousing same-sex fantasies before. Likewise, when looking across surveys that ask about both sexual identity and same-sex behavior, many surveys have found that the number of people who say they’ve ever had a same-sex experience is about twice as high as the number who identify as part of the LGBTQ population. For purposes of this article, we’re going to focus mostly on sexual identity, but please do keep in mind that identity, attraction, and behavior all tell us something a little different about human sexuality. So, depending on how you ask the question, you might come to very different conclusions.
The First Nationally Representative Sex Study in America
Believe it or not, it wasn’t until the 1990s that anyone conducted a nationally representative sex survey in the United States to determine the percentage of the population that is gay. It was known as the National Health and Social Life Survey, and part of the reason it was such a long time coming was because Kinsey’s findings were shocking to a lot of people. It was actually really hard to get funding to do the first national sex survey because many were afraid of what it would reveal. The 1990s study painted a very different picture of sexuality than Kinsey’s work, especially when it came to understanding the sexual orientation of Americans. In fact, just 2.8% of men and 1.4% of women identified as gay or bisexual in this survey (other sexual identities such as queer were not assessed because they weren’t as prominent or widely known as they are today). This study gave Kinsey’s critics a lot of fodder for discounting his work—after all, this was a representative survey, and it pointed to a much lower prevalence of homosexuality in America than Kinsey suggested. However, it’s hard to know what to make of sexual identity stats from the early 1990s, which was during the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in America and a time when there was still a lot of stigma and fear attached to homosexuality.