These figures may not be sky-high enough to sustain genetic traits specific to this team, but the evolutionary biologist Jeremy Yoder points out in a blog send, external that for much of up-to-date history gay people haven't been living openly gay lives. Compelled by world to enter marriages and have children, their reproduction rates may have been higher than they are now.
How many gay people have children also depends on how you define creature "gay". Many of the "straight" men who have sex with fa'afafine in Samoa go on to get married and have children.
"The category of homosexual sexuality becomes very diffuse when you take a multicultural perspective," says Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Hawaii. "If you travel to India, you'll find that if someone says they are 'gay' or 'homosexual' then that immediately identifies them as Western. But that doesn't imply there's no homosexuality there."
Similarly in the West, there is evidence that many people proceed through a phase of homosexual action. In the 1940s, US sex researcher Alfred K
Adult LGBT Population in the United States
This report provides estimates of the number and percent of the U.S. adult 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 facts for these estimates. Pooling multiple years of statistics provides more stable estimates—particularly at the state level.
Combining 2020-2021 BRFSS data, we estimate that 5.5% of U.S. adults identify 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. live 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 survive in the Northeast (2.6 million).
The percent of adults who identify as LGBT
Stances of Faiths on LGBTQ+ Issues: Roman Catholic Church
BACKGROUND
The Roman Catholic Church is the largest Christian denomination in the world, with approximately 1.2 billion members across the globe. With its origins in the earliest days of Christianity, the Church traces its leadership––in the person of the Pope––to St. Peter, identified by Jesus as “the rock” on which the Church would be built.
The Catholic Church in the Combined States numbers over 70 million members, and is organized in 33 Provinces, each led by an archbishop. Each bishop answers directly to the Pope, not to an archbishop. Those Provinces are further divided into 195 dioceses, each led by a bishop. At the found of the organizational structure are local parishes, headed by a pastor, appointed by the local bishop. The Conference of Catholic Bishops in the Combined States meets semi-annually.
As part of a global corporation with its institutional center at the Vatican, the Catholic Church in America is shaped by worldwide societal and cultural trends. It is further shaped by leadership that is entirely male, with women excluded from the priesthood and thus from key leadership roles.
LGBTQ+ EQUALITY
ON S
Is 10% of the population really gay?
For a single statistic to be the primary propaganda weapon for a drastic political movement is unusual. Back in 1977, the US National Gay Task Force (NGTF) was invited into the White House to meet President Jimmy Carter’s representatives – a first for gay and woman loving woman groups. The NGTF’s most prominent campaigning slogan was “we are everywhere”, backed up by the memorable statistical claim that one in 10 of the US population was gay – this figure was deeply and passionately contested.
So where did Bruce Voeller, a scientist who was a founder and first director of the NGTF, get this nice round 10% from? To detect out, we possess to delve assist into Alfred Kinsey’s surveys in 1940s America, which were groundbreaking at the time but are now seen as archaic in their methods: he sought out respondents in prisons and the gay underworld, made friends with them and, over a cigarette, noted down their behaviours using an obscure code. Kinsey did not believe that sexual identity was fixed and simply categorised, and perhaps his most lasting contribution was his scale, still used today, in which individuals are rated from exclusively heterosexual to exclusive
What’s Behind the Rapid Climb in LGBTQ Identity?
Newsletter Pride 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, pansexual, 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 raise in LGBTQ identity. In 2024, nearly one in ten (9.3 percent) Americans identify as LGBTQ.
The constant rise in LGBTQ culture among the public is worth noting, but it’s not the most essential 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 adolescent 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
