The US is now seeing its youth identify as queer more than ever before in its history. The study was conducted using 15,000 sample of people over the age of 18 in 2020.
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A gradual increase over the last couple of years
The results found that 5.6% of Americans identified as either, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer which is up from 4.5% in 2017. Gallup editor Jeffrey Jones believes that there is a very good explanation for why more and more people are identifying with the queer umbrella term:
Younger people are growing up in an environment where being gay, lesbian or bisexual is not as taboo as it was in the past. So they may just feel more comfortable telling an interviewer in a telephone survey how they describe themselves. In the past, people would maybe be more reluctant.
Feeling 'safe' and coming out are closely related
When respondents were asked about their sexual orientation, 16% of people born between 1997 and 2002–otherwise known as being born in Generation Z– said they considered themselves to fall somewhere in the queer spectrum.
For other generations, considerable percentages were also recorded. In the case of millennials, nine per cent of them identified as queer and four per cent of Generation 'X-ers' said they were definitely not straight.
Dulcinea Pitagora, a New York City-based psychotherapist, who specialises in working specifically with sexually marginalised groups explains that:
The more people who feel comfortable and safe in disclosing who they are, the more others will disclose, and the more people will be living authentically as who they are in the world.
And added:
Also the more awareness [there is] around how many queer people there actually are in the world, the more people will realise the great diversity in the queer community, and the more non-queer people will realize they have more in common with queer people than they may have realised.
