New Study Reports Nearly 5% Of U.S. Adults Identify As LGBTQ

Looks like the percentage of LGBTQ adults in America is greater than initially reported, as per a new report from The Williams Institute at UCLA.

On Tuesday (March 5), the report via Reuters revealed that about 4.5 percent of adults in the United States identify as members of the LGBTQ community. If you need to do the math, that's about 350,000 of the 11.3 million Americans. As for specifics, the institute discovered that Washington D.C. had the highest percentage of LGBTQ people at 9.8 percent and North Dakota had the lowest at 2.7 percent. Meanwhile, self-identified LGBTQ folks tend to skew on the younger side of the spectrum as only 23 percent of the aforementioned 11.3 million Americans were over the age of 50 compared with 47 percent of non-LGBT adults.

"Younger people are more likely to actually live as LGBT and to identify that way because they are growing up in a time when it’s more acceptable to acknowledge those feelings and to act on them," Kerith Conron, research director at The Williams Institute, told Reuters. And while the LGBTQ community is made up of all ethnic groups, people of color represent a slightly higher percentage than they do in the general population — an observation that requires further research down the line. Back in 2011, the Williams Institute estimated that the LGBTQ population in the United States averaged around 3.5 percent based on other survey data.

Photo: Getty Images


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