Share of LGBT Americans Keeps Rising Steadily. NewsWire

NewsWire: 3/5/22

• The share of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify as LGBT has nearly doubled since just 2012. Fully 21% say they’re LGBT, with the biggest share identifying as bisexual. (Gallup)
  
• NH: The share of American adults who identify as LGBT keeps rising, from 5.6% in 2020 to 7.1% in 2021. The most recent figure is double the share from 2012, when Gallup first asked this question.
• As has been the case in the last few surveys, the increase was largely driven by increased LGBT identification among the youngest adults, which rose more sharply this year than it has in previous surveys. Fully 20.8% of 18- to 24-year-olds identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s up nearly 5 percentage points in just a year. Older Millennials (ages 25-40) are also more likely to identify as LGBT, but have seen a more modest rise (up +1.4 percentage points to 10.5%). All older generations saw comparatively smaller increases under 1 percentage point.

• More than half (56.8%) of LGBT individuals identify as bisexual, while 20.7% identify as gay and 13.9% as lesbian. LGBT Millennials and Xers are most likely to identify as bisexual, while Boomers and Silent are just as likely to say they’re bisexual as they are gay or lesbian.
• When we wrote about the last edition of this survey in 2021 (see “One in Six 18- to 23-Year-Olds Identifies as LGBT”), we noted that while it’s clear that more American adults are identifying as LGBT, it’s less clear whether this has influenced actual sexual behaviors.
• In the coming years, as the first wave of Homelanders turns 18, there’s no doubt that the share of LGBT adults will continue to rise. But while this will certainly be reflected in branding and pop culture, there are few signs that it’s changing how Americans live to the same degree. In another recent poll, Gallup found that just under 10.0% of LGBT Americans is married to a same-sex spouse. A larger share (11.4%) is married to an opposite-sex spouse. Among bisexual Americans, just 1.0% is married to a same-sex spouse.

Did You Know?

• YouTube Has a Captions Problem. YouTube has become a bigger player in children’s entertainment (see “Disney’s New Competitor”) following efforts to clean up its Wild West image. But as this Wired piece illustrates, the site’s troubles aren’t over. According to a new study that examined more than 7,000 videos from 24 popular kids’ channels, 40% of these videos’ AI-generated captions displayed words from a list of 1,300 inappropriate terms. In about 1% of videos, the captions included any of 16 words deemed “highly inappropriate.” These mistakes occurred when the algorithm mistranslated closely related words, such as rendering “craft” as “crap” or “buster” as “bastard.” While automated captions are not available on YouTube Kids, most parents of children age 11 or younger (80%) say that their kids watch the standard version of YouTube. While experts suggest that this problem can be avoided by creating a blocklist of words, this is unlikely to happen on YouTube.