in a relatively short amount of time. Just last year, the number of married same-sex

couples in the US has tripled. To see how this shift has changed LGBT demographics,

we asked Dr. Gary Gates of the Williams Institute to tell us more.

What percentage of the U.S. population today would identify as LGBT based on your data?

So the best estimates that we have for the percentage of the population in the US that

identify as LGBT are around 4%. Various surveys range from roughly of 3 to 5% in most surveys.

Well if you look at identity as your measurement, um, it’s around, most surveys are around

four percent. Um, three to five percent, you do get occasionally some surveys that are

higher than that. One interesting thing about those surveys is among younger people, it’s

always substantially higher. So for instance in...in the Gallup survey, if you’re under

age 30, it’s well over six percent identifying as LGBT, but if you’re over 30, it’s under

four percent. So I suspect that in the fairly near future, uh, those numbers are going to

continue to go up. But if you use these other measures like sexual

behavior or...sexual..uh...or your attractions to..to either...um, people of similar gender

to you or different gender to you, um you get much higher numbers. Um if you ask people

if they’ve ever had same sex sexual encounter, you usually get numbers in the eight to nine

percent range. And if you ask if they have any kind of attractions that are beyond...um...different

sex attractions, so any sort of same sex attractions, you often get numbers, uh well over 10 percent.

Wow. I mean that’s a huge difference in just how you ask the question.

and do you think those numbers are gonna change over time?

They have already. Um in survey... we don’t have a lot of older surveys that asks these

kinds of questions. But certainly if we look at some surveys in the early 90s, um, sexual

orientation identity, so identifying at that point was usually just lesbian, gay or bisexual,

it was only in about the two percent range. So it’s more than doubled in the last ten

years.

So are there any uh...racial socioeconomic religious correlation to be found in the identity

data?

Well yes I think one of the interesting things there’s a stereotype for instance that around

racial, race and ethnicity that uh racial and ethnic minorities would be kind of less

likely to identify as LGBT because uh of more socially conservative environments in some

cases, um more broad social stigma so perhaps uh an unwillingness to kind of add to my stigmatization

by identifying as LGBT. But in fact um the recent Gallup data which is the largest sample

of of LGBT people we have as far as I know in the world from a population based sampling

um most racial and ethnic minorities have higher proportion identifying as LGBT right

now. And it turns out that the reason for that is is that younger people are much more

likely to self identify as LGBT than older people and racial and ethnic minorities in

this country are younger than white people. And that skew in the age it actually explains

quite a bit of the difference in the identity patterns and so. But overall it’s no longer

accurate in the United States to say there are big differences in identity by race and

ethnicity um. we see prevalence to be very similar uh across racial ethnic categories.

Do those same kind of attitudes play out over the same sex marriage argument as well or

the same sex marriage discussion rather?

Well certainly yes, well they attract again communities that are more supportive of lcof

marriage equality tend to have higher percentages of LGBT pop you know people identifying as

LGBT. So if you look at states, you know if you look at uh percent LGBT among states um

the northeast and the West tend to have higher proportions and i think that, it’s not surprising

that those places are also then places that have more supportive laws like marriage equality.

Um and I think those two things go hand in hand.you in order to pass supportive laws

uh around LGBT, you have to have a fairly visible already a fairly visible active LGBT

community uh to promote the law.

Right. And you mentioned states in the west, in the north...in the northwest, what..(pause)

what states have the largest collections of people who identify as LGBT, and why would..why...why

would that be? Well and again there few questions largest

number or largest percentage Right-

And largest number are basically just states with a lot of people

Right- So you know California, Texas, New York. those

states tend to have the largest number and the same thing when we look at cities. but

if we look at percentages again places with the highest percentages tend to be the states

you would expect so uh new england states, and the west coast, California, Oregon, Washington

um. in general those are the places that have the highest proportions of LGBT people and

if you look at at for instance Gallup recently did some analysis of metropolitan areas and

that not surprising San Francisco was ranked highly.

But I think one of the interesting things to note from that was that Salt Lake City

Yea- Made the top ten of metro areas and and and

that goes back to a comment I made earlier about this relationship between laws and supportive

laws and LGBT visibility. It I suspected that LGBT visibility was changing

even in conservative places like Utah and certainly in Salt Lake City and and you see

that they are the first state in,

I think it’s seven years to pass a broad based anti-discrimination law that included

sexual orientation and gender identity and i think those two statistics aren’t are

highly related. um I think that the reason that happened was that visibility in places

like Salt Lake City got large enough that they could really make the case for those

laws and as I said it showed up in the Gallup figures.

Do you think that’s — uh kind of a chicken and egg situation where, is it the population

is there and therefore it Right

fosters the law, or is it that the law can then foster

It’s Silence. or an opening for that law fosters an increase

in population It’s absolutely both that um Some underlying

social acceptance that allows LGBT people to be more visible certainly helps in the

beginnings of getting better laws um. But once laws are passed and certainly um we have

evidence at the Williams institute we’ve done some studies showing that after marriage

equality is passed in a state, even if it’s done through uh a judicial uh you know a court

ruling that support for marriage for same sex couples goes up in the state and that

probably that increases the visibility of same sex couples in the state um and you know

probably LGBT people generally as well. so the two factors to go hand in hand and you’re

exactly right its definitely a chicken and egg situation.

With most of the country having already legalized same-sex marriage, the upcoming Supreme Court

ruling seems like a foregone conclusion. But how that will change the face of the LGBT

population, and how global perceptions will shift even further, is yet to be seen.

A huge thanks to Gary Gates at UCLA’S Williams Institute for joining us on TestTube News

today. If you’d like to learn about more awesome research coming out of UCLA, check

out this video about how our DNA may have a big effect on our relationships. Thanks

for watching! Don’t forget to subscribe.