Updating the count

I see that Gallup has come out with it's annual "who's identifying as what" sexuality survey (for Americans).  

Here's my post last year about the last update.

This year, the headline news is that LGBT identification is up to 7.1%, but (as might be expected from watching pop culture), the growth is mostly from younger people - especially women - identifying as bisexual.  Here's the two key tables from 2020, and last year:

So "transgender" is pretty steady, and only slow growth in "gay".   But "bisexual" is up a whole percentage point (nearly).  As for the gender break up between men and women, this table shows the details:

 

Isn't that split between men and women curious, summarised again in this line:  

Women (6.0%) are much more likely than men (2.0%) to say they are bisexual. Men are more likely to identify as gay (2.5%) than as bisexual, while women are much more likely to identify as bisexual than as lesbian (1.9%).

One other thing of note is this:

In addition to the 7.1% of U.S. adults who consider themselves to be an LGBT identity, 86.3% say they are straight or heterosexual, and 6.6% do not offer an opinion.

I would suspect that a higher than usual proportion of that group should be in one of the LGBT categories.

Anyway, the results still seem to back the guesstimate I made in my 2013 post that, at least amongst men, the gay and bisexual percentage is probably around 4 to 5%.   The article also ends with this:

Given the large disparities in LGBT identification between younger and older generations of Americans, the proportion of all Americans who identify as LGBT can be expected to grow in the future as younger generations will constitute a larger share of the total U.S. adult population. With one in 10 millennials and one in five Gen Z members identifying as LGBT, the proportion of LGBT Americans should exceed 10% in the near future.

However, a large number of bisexual claiming women behind that figure are going to end up in marriages with men, and overall, the growth in alternative sexual identities is not going to be reflected to the same degree in the number of gay marriages (or gay relationships).

Update: a tweet about this noticed: