Obviously, sexual orientation is something you are born with and don’t choose, and not something that changes with peer pressure (just like the population of left-handed people isn’t going to increase if left-handedness becomes popular.)
So does this mean that, throughout history, 1/5 of the population has always been gay, lesbian, bi or transgender, but this was always under-reported since it was frowned upon back then?
I’m very suspicious of this figure. However, I head up the DE&I team at work and have observed that many more of the GenZers are happy to define themselves as queer if they feel they diverge at all from gender or sexuality ‘norms’ - eg not feeling terribly feminine, once had a crush on their best friend etc. My 14 year God daughter declared to her mother the other week that she was ‘pan sexual’, even though she is not sexually active. I think she thinks it’s cool to be open to possibilities.
Full disclosure: I’m an ‘old fashioned’ lesbian, ie, I’m happy to define myself as such and make a clear declaration on who I fancy, and I do feel a bit eye-rolly with Gen Zers at times on this issue.
Of course, it’s also true that life is not all black and white, and many many people fall somewhere on a spectrum. This concept was much less clear to people in the past. Perhaps people are just happier to recognise this in themselves nowadays. There, ended on a non-grumpy note.
Yeah, I think that’s an overgenerous figure for what we traditionally think of as being “LGBT”, but the range of orientations/proclitivies/etc that the full alphabet covers has widened considerably in recent years so it’s not surprising that people who wouldn’t identify with the earlier, narrower definitions might fall under the newer ones.
The 20% figure is staggeringly high, even when the 2.7% for the Boomers is nowhere near the reality, either.
While I agree one does not chose it, I would say that it is not yet fully understood if one is ‘born with it’. It appears that some may, others may start one way and then change to another later in life, and some events early in life, but after birth may even influence it.
For all that I believe that the number has been inflated because of teens trying to figure out who they are, I also think the numbers of the past are a lot lower than reality. Especially in the eras where admitting you were anything but a cis het individual could have you hurt, jailed or worse.
^^This.
Lots of HS & college-aged people are still figuring out who / what they are. Most of the “unsures” end up settling into traditional roles & attitudes, and not merely from the desire (or necessity) to conform or be reviled. Some fraction don’t. What that fraction is remains to be discovered.
I wonder if that 10% number that was thrown around in the 1990s is maybe closer to reality than 20% or 3% then?
It is not really simple to directly compare recently-gathered U.S. data, and norms and definitions, with that “throughout history”.
The obvious comparison is with the Kinsey Institute reports (1940s–1950s), not the 1990s. Kinsey himself explained, “[Males] do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.”, so depending on your working definition of “LGBT” you are potentially going to cover a lot of people and that is not a characteristic of Generation Z as opposed to Baby Boomers. The 10% figure sounds like what they obtained for “men who were more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55”, but there is also reason to examine their sampling and statistical methodology critically. Now a difference between 10% and 20% would be enormous, but it is not clear that the data supports a rise from merely 2.7% over the rise of the Baby Boomers all the way through to today; they were getting larger figures even before.
To quote from below,
If you believe Kinsey, in the volume on males 46% of the population “engages in both heterosexual and homosexual activities, or reacts to persons of both sexes, in the course of their adult lives” and ~13% “react erotically to other males without having overt homosexual contacts after the onset of adolescence”, etc.
I think “born that way” (a popular phrasing) may be a bit of a catch-all, as nobody is absolutely certain how much influence the first few years have. It is a short phrase that stands in contrast with calling it a choice. I take the gist of it to mean that orientation is something that happens to us, and only the recognition of our attractions happens within any of our memory, not their formation per se.
I worked for a decade in LGBTQ advocacy, and used to sometimes ask an audience whether anybody there chose their orientation (and gender identity, for that matter). I’d tell people I would like to hear from them in the moment, or later, if they considered it their own choice. Only one person ever said yes. We discussed it at length several times, and he elaborated by saying that he was attracted to men and women, but chose to have sexual relationships with women only. I tried to explain a distinction, namely, that the attraction was what made the orientation, and not his choices about which attractions to act upon, but he wasn’t having it. He maintained and insisted that this meant he had chosen his straight orientation. He also was a Christian, “a child of god”, his religion central to his life, he considered being gay a sin, and he was part of an organization that practiced conversion therapy.
I think sexuality is on a spectrum; some people are exclusively attracted to one sex or the other, but most have some degree of attraction to both. In the context of a deeply homophobic society, it makes sense that anyone who was at all capable of heterosexual attraction would likely go that route, and might very well repress their gay desires to the point of not being consciously aware of them. So I’m not surprised that growing social acceptance has greatly increased the number of people willing to identify as LGBetc. Indeed, it does seem that in some younger social circles, the social pressure may be against identifying as straight.
Without more than anecdotal evidence, I suspect most people have some level of bisexuality, it’s just suppressed, unacknowledged, or otherwise hidden in most. But younger generations are less and less repressed, and less and less hiding such parts of themselves.
I think this is pretty much it. Over the course of a persons life one may move from one part of the spectrum or not. I find it easy to believe that 80% of the people are straight and never give it a second thought their entire life. But that 20% either are undeniably homosexual all of the time or moving around the different parts of the spectrum or to straight depending on indivudual circumstances.
No one my age could have found it easy to come out as genderqueer or equivalent; we didn’t have the words for it. The girls at least had feminism and the structure for saying “I reject sexist double-standard expectations, so don’t expect dainty and demure from me, and if I’m more like one of the boys than you think a girl oughta be, so fucking what?”, although it’s not quite the same thing… but the boys most emphatically did not, nothing of that ilk.
In high school we all knew about gay and lesbian people, including being exposed to the attitude that there’s nothing wrong with it and pride and gay rights and all that, but there sure wasn’t any social role for “out gay guy” (or gal) in our high school. Knowing about trans people and transitioning and operations was more limited to people who read a lot, it was depicted as weird and deviant like a circus sideshow, or people who wanted to be chained and flogged and their nipples clamped with alligator clips, definitely not something you’d easily embrace and put forth as your own identity. Bi girls weren’t hot yet, not the way it became later. Bi guys were gay guys who felt the need to protest that they liked girls too. Being homosexual was still regarded by a substantial percent of polite people as sinful or sick and perverted or pathetic, and by less polite people as something you accuse other people of to insult them.
So yeah, certainly some percent of people who’d be comfortable being out in 2023 if they were young adults now were not doing so in 1973.
I think a lot of it is just that the choices are different now : As far as I can tell this is the question on the survey
- Which of the following best represents how you think of yourself?
- Choice of answers: Gay or lesbian; Straight, that is not gay or lesbian; Bisexual; Something else; I don’t know.
Thirty years ago the choices would have been straight , gay or maybe bisexual. “Something else” would not have been a choice. “Asexual” would not have been seen as an orientation, and if you were not interested in sex but sometimes engaged in sexual activity to please a romantic partner, you almost certainly would have answered based on the gender(s) of your partner(s) . Add in everything else that might be covered by “something else” or “I don’t know” today and I’m actually a little surprised it’s only 20%
Yeah. I’m pretty sure that I now qualify as “gender non-comforming”. But most of my life I was just a feminist woman doing what I wanted to do and wearing what I wanted to wear.
So I think some of it is a greater number of people willing to say, even on a survey/to themselves, that they’re not straight; and some of it is perceiving a greater breadth of possibilities.
In 1947 Alfred Kinsey published his report that found 38% of men had same sex encounters to the point of organism (he was surveying a population that had gone through WWI and WWII). As society stops seeing sexuality and gender as binary (you are straight or gay, male or female) and expands our definitions of queer to include a gender non-binary, asexuality, bisexuality, etc. AND as those sorts of expressions of self become more acceptable, more people will be more comfortable identifying as queer.
My own feeling is that in actuality the number of people who are queer is much higher - more in line with Kinsey. But that the majority of those people are on bisexual, gender non-binary, asexual, etc. And if being so is OK as you discover your sexuality, the crush you had on your best friend when you were 12 is PART OF your sexual awakening even if you later marry monogamously to someone of the opposite gender, you are more likely to acknowledge that you are bisexual in spirit, if not in practice.
When my youngest did the Unitarian Our Whole Lives sexuality education in high school ten years ago, NONE of the 20 kids in the room identified as straight. Each of them saw themselves as somewhere on a spectrum of gender and/or sexuality. Now, they are UU kids, they were all sort of raised with the idea of acceptance and without rigidity.
(I myself am bisexual in spirit, but I’ve been monogamously married for 30 years. And thorny, I know a lot of women my age who say "yeah, if I were 20 now instead of going on 60, I’d identify as non-binary.)
I’m not surprised. But I actually identify as strongly female – just not feminine. How that would have caused me to answer that poll when I was 20, I have no idea.
Is that what the cool kids were calling it then? 
Stoopid prudish spell-check.
Another thing to remember is that until the late 19th century, homosexuality was not an identity. Homosexual behavior had been seen for the previous…well several millennia…as something that, in Christian times, any man (lesbianism was barely considered) could be tempted into, and something that in the pre Christian era in both Greece and Rome was widely practiced. It was the act of being the submissive in sex that was looked down upon - as long as you were dominant, sex with other men was fine.
The binary that was established in the early 20th century - you were straight or gay with little room for bisexuality - had a lot to do with the medicalization of homosexuality, the belief that it was a disease or mental illness, and possibly most importantly, the desire to control it through law. (See Margot Canady, The Straight State The Straight State | Princeton University Press)