Most of my life I heard about the 10%. Ten percent of any given population, in any culture, were likely a sexual minority. They fell somewhere on the Kinsey scale of human sexuality other than 100% heterosexual. The closer that you identified with being a 6, the closer that you were to being 100% gay. Maybe they were men who mostly liked women, but if the right guy came along their hormones went nuts. Or perhaps they were the opposite, a gay man, who was occasionally confused by his attraction to a certain woman that he knew. And the human population was actually secretly bi-sexual and just wouldn’t admit it, because of religious mores and cultural taboo. The population fell on the Kinsey scale, as it did every other scale, with the majority somewhere there in the middle. 50/50 attracted to people of both sexes. Or 60/40. Or 70/30. I think that was why certain gay men would haunt straight bars, hoping to pick up the guy willing to take a walk on his wild side on any given night. Or that old joke about the difference in a gay guy and a straight guy, 5 beers! Being a gay man, who is all 6, I can only speak from the male perspective or experience. I will have to rely on my lesbian sisters to fill in the blanks about the female side of this equation.
It has been a real shock at how quickly things have changed in the US regarding LGBTQ acceptance in the last 20 years. We moved from the US Supreme Court striking down all of the sodomy laws in the US with the 1996 decision in Lawrence v Texas to legal same-sex civil marriage in all 50 states in the 2015 decision of Obergefell v Hodges. It was the US Supreme Court that paved the road;
The strongest expansions in LGBT rights in the United States have come from the United States Supreme Court. In four landmark rulings between the years 1996 and 2015, the Supreme Court invalidated a state law banning protected class recognition based upon homosexuality, struck down sodomy laws nationwide, struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, and made same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
– Wikipedia, LGBT Rights in the USA
And I knew that some of the strongest advocates of acceptance of LGBTQ human rights were the youth, the Millenials, the folks in the 18 to 34 age range in the US. LGBTQ rights are important to them because someone’s sexual orientation or someone’s gender identity isn’t important to them. They love and accept all of their family, friends & associates just as they are. “Just as God created them to be.” Which is why Millenials are the folks who don’t go to church. Millenials can’t be bothered by the one place that is the most discriminatory and anti-LGBTQ in US culture. Not to mention segregated. Aside from a white racist militia compound in eastern Oregon or northern Idaho.
This past week GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) released the 3rd Annual Accelerating Acceptance report.
GLAAD’s third annual “Accelerating Acceptance” report revealed that 20 percent of millennials (ages 18-34) openly identify as LGBTQ. Comparatively, 7 percent of baby boomers (ages 52-71) identify themselves as such.
As acceptance grows, the gender binary appears to break down. Twelve percent of millennials identify as non-cisgender. Only 3 percent of baby boomers and 6 percent of the Generation X set (ages 35-51) identified themselves as such.
– Accerlerating Acceptance, GLAAD
In a nutshell, cisgender means that someone identifies with the gender presentation with which they were born, “He has male genitalia and he identifies as a boy.” A person who has male genitalia, but identifies as a girl is transgender. Gender identity, the gender with which someone identifies for them self, is not that same as sexual orientation, the sex of the person to whom someone is attracted.
Here is a link to the full report, Accelerating Acceptance, to read it for yourself. The Kinsey scale is from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license. The main photo is from Linkedin.
Additional Info added in June 2020:
The team at BestColleges.com partnered with CampusPride.org to share resources that will benefit students who identify as LGBTQ+. Our Pride Month Series deep dives into the best colleges for LGBTQ+ students, scholarships, COVID-19 resources and safety tips. Take a look below:
Pride Month Series
Student Experience Guide:
https://www.bestcolleges.com/
State Specific Program Details:
https://www.bestcolleges.com/
Scholarship Guide:
https://www.bestcolleges.com/
Safety Resources:
https://www.bestcolleges.com/
Impact of COVID-19:
https://www.bestcolleges.com/