How many Americans are Gay?

Illustration By Domenic Bahmann

Inside the efforts to finally identify the size of the nation’s LGBT population

By Katy Steinmetz

For centuries, being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in America meant hiding at least part of who you were. The stigma traces as far back as the colonial era, when sodomy was a capital crime, women were arrested for having same-sex relations and men were jailed for wearing women’s clothes.

It’s estimated that tens of thousands of people were arrested for crossing such lines before the turn of the 20th century, during which time some states allowed the sterilization of so-called perverts. It wasn’t until 1998, the year Google was invented, that the Supreme Court struck down any remaining bans on sex between men. The years since have brought a rapid social transformation, with LGBT Americans increasingly accepted throughout society and accorded many–though far from all–of its legal protections.

As the LGBT population moves into its full and equal place in public life, many people are asking an old question with new urgency: just how many LGBT Americans are there? After centuries in the shadows, many experts believe that we need a full accounting of the nation’s LGBT population and how they live for legal, economic and health reasons. Now, for the first time, a group of experts from 21 federal agencies are working on a project to figure out how to do just that. The results could pave the way for first-ever surveys of America’s sexual orientations and gender identities and influence everything from local laws to military policy to health care.

For many LGBT people, there is also a keen sense of dignity and power at stake in such research. “For decades our struggle has been to stop being invisible,” says San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener, an openly gay lawmaker who is proposing this data be collected in the City by the Bay. “When you don’t have data about a community, at times it can seem like the community doesn’t exist.” The rub is that there’s less consensus about how to take a fuzzy rainbow and split it up into neat and tidy boxes, especially as the ways people identify continue to shift.

When pollsters asked Americans last year how they would identify on the Kinsey Scale—a six point rating spanning from “exclusively homosexual” to “exclusively heterosexual”—about a third of millennials pointed somewhere in the “non-binary” middle, compared to about 8% of people over the age of 45.

Many people aren’t even aware that they have a gender identity. Others are but don’t happen to identify as male or female. And though the answers to these questions have public policy implications, many feel they are private matters—perhaps ones they’ve had a hard time admitting to themselves or their families and have no intention of telling the government. Privacy concerns and terminology quandaries are among the issues that the federal working group, led out of the Office of Management and Budget, are working hard to figure out, as politicians across the nation argue that these demographics, and their struggles, must be recognized and researched.

“It’s high time for the LGBT community to count and be counted,” says California state assemblyman David Chiu, who proposed a law that will require state health agencies to start asking these questions. “Data saves lives,” he says. That is, if you can figure out how to get it.

Read more:
http://time.com/lgbt-stats/?xid=time_socialflow_facebook