LGBT Activist – Youth Will Never Turn Back?

Gallup recently released poll results showing that 7.2% of American adults identify as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual.” When Gallup first started measuring LGBT statistics in 2012, this number was 3.5%, which means that the LGBT community as a proportion of the U.S. population has doubled over the last ten years.

However, the poll displays a more nuanced result when this 7.2% of the population is  broken down proportionally by age group. Only 1.7% of the Silent Generation, 2.7% of baby boomers, and 3.3% of Generation X identify as LGBT, which leaves the remainder of the U.S. population’s 7.2% to be made up by millennials and Generation Z: a significant 11.2% of the former and a staggering 19.7% of the latter. So according to Gallup’s numbers, not only is 1 or 2 in every 20 U.S. adults lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or “other LGBT,” but 1 in every 5 gen-z-ers is. We’ve come a long way over the last 50 years. Flash back to 1972, when the American Psychiatric Association was classifying homosexuality as a mental illness; now, in 2022, 1 in every 5 of young adults place themselves outside of the traditional heterosexual paradigm.