Can Living in the City Make you Gay?

–Cross-posted as Social (In)Queery

Gallup recently published results from a new question garnering a nationally representative sample of more than 120,000 Americans: “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?”  The results come out of interviews conducted in 2012 and confirm recent estimates by demographer Gary Gates on the size of the LGBT population in the U.S.  Combining data from a range of surveys, Gates suggested that approximately 3.5% of the adult population in the U.S. identifies as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and an additional 0.3% identifies as transgendered.  The Gallup poll also found that around 3.5% of the U.S. adult population says “yes” when asked whether they “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”

These findings are interesting and important for a number of reasons.  One issue that they bring up is simply the issue of actually measuring sexuality.*  It’s harder than you might assume.  For instance, Gallup asks how people identify themselves.  Questions about sexual identification produce some of the lowest percentage of LGBT responses on surveys.  Asking questions about  sexual desires and behaviors produces higher percentages.  Questions about same-sex attraction have found that as much as 11% of the U.S. population can be classified as LGB.  Similarly, questions concerning same-sex behaviors have produced numbers as high as 8.8% of the U.S. population.  This doesn’t mean that the Gallup findings are unimportant; it means that we need to recognize that sexuality is more dynamic that we might initially assume.

Subsequently, Gallup released a report documenting the relative prevalence of LGBT individuals throughout the U.S.  Simply put, LGBT individuals are not uniformly distributed throughout the country.  Some places have relatively high numbers, while other have lower numbers.  Gallup chose to break this down by state.  The state with the highest proportion is not actually a state at all; it’s a federal district—the District of Columbia (10%).  The state with the lowest proportion of “yes’s” to the question was North Dakota (1.7%).