Sexuality Stack Exchange Archive

Do we have statistics showing that LGBT population is on rise? If true, for what reasons?

Recently in the United States the marriage of LGBT people is allowed by law. This had a huge impact on media, and as a regular YouTube watcher, I felt like the number of people who now declare that they’re LGBT is on rise.

Of course, a personal inductive reasoning is not a good argument for conclusion. But Googling a simple term like LGBT population rise (go to images) almost supports this statement.

If it’s true, there might be some reasons that need contemplation:

  1. Once something becomes official, more people tend to experience it. Maybe there are millions of people out there who have no idea what is their sexual orientation.
  2. Maybe it’s contagious, meaning that a man who’s more exposed to gays is more probable to become a gay himself.
  3. Maybe the shift in our food-system and lifestyle has a direct intensification effect on this phenomenon.

So, do we have any robust statistics and research on this? What causation is explained for it?

Answer 259

After doing some research, I could not conclude that the LGBT community is on the rise as there are few numbers available. Since you mentioned the legalization of gay marriage in the United States, I concentrated my research there.

An article from the Huffington Post highlights the results from a survey conveyed in 2014 as follows :

According to the results, 96.6 percent of respondents identified as straight, 1.6 percent identified as gay or lesbian and 0.7 percent identified as bisexual.

The reported number of less than 2 percent is lower than some figures released in previous years.

So there seems to be a certain stability in numbers, but with the lack of past statistics on the subject, it is hard to come up with a clear answer. On a side note, the personal character of one’s definition of sexual orientation, makes it hard to gather reliable statistics.

Now here is my take on the three arguments that you proposed:

  1. Sexual orientation is hard to define and questioning one’s own sexuality is part of the normal development of each individual. It is not to be compared to a fad or a trend, people have been bullied, suppressed and so on because of their sexual orientation. The legalization of gay marriage in the United States is a step towards acceptance, and people might be more open to trying to understand their own sexuality if they know they are accepted as they are. It won’t promote the LGBT community, and won’t make people want to “change” their sexual orientation but might encourage those who live in fear or shame to be proud and open as they are.

  2. I think the term “contagious” is incorrect here. I would believe that in parts of the world where more people are open about discovering one’s sexuality is encouraged, it might be more frequent for men and women to have experiences with people of the same sex. Does that make them gay/lesbian? Not really, as sexuality is not always black or white. Sexuality is also free to change over time. I recommend that you read about the Kinsey Scale so that you can get a better idea.

http://kinseyconfidential.org/kinsey-scale-purpose-significance/

  1. As for this argument, I don’t really see how it relates to the original question.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/15/health-survey-americans-gay_n_5587696.html

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr077.pdf

Answer 238

I never heard the term LGBT before (maybe because I’m not an english native speaker), but from the context I can read, that it has to do with homosexuality. So I understand the question like this:

Do we have statistics, that show that the percentage of homosexual people is rising?

Here you must make a very clear distinction between people who really are gay or lesbian (or bisexual) and people who dare to confess to be gay, lesbian or bisexual.

The number of the second group (people who dare to confess to be non-hetero) is raising, while I think that the percentage of people who really are (and feel) non-hetero ist constant since many thousands of years.

There was times in human history (ancient greek for example) where gay love had a higher image than the love between men and women. So in those times it was not just only normal to be gay, gay men even was seen as some kind of “better” or “nobler” men. No wonder, that in those times the percentage of men claiming to be gay, was very high.

But in mediaeval times, or in Nazi-Germany, homosexuals have been killed for being gay or lesbian. So almost nobody dared to confess his/her homosexuality. But I am sure, that in Nazi-germay the percentage of people who really was homo- or bi-sexual was as high as 2500 years ago in Sparta or Thebes.

So, if you find statistics about this trend, you most probably will find numbers of people who dare to say “no, I’m not heterosexual”. I think it is really hard to find serious statistics, that really inform you about the number of people, who really are and feel this way.

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