According to the Wall Street Journal, same-sex couples account for 1% of all households nationwide. Of that, half are married and a little less than half are unmarried partners. The remainder live alone or in other arrangements.
11 thoughts on “Raw data: LGBT households”
Comments are closed.
Will a forthcoming WSJ opinion piece condemn these 1percenters?
That's funny. Judging by news commentary and the inevitable political grandstanding, I would have assumed that these folks were a near majority.
Maybe only 1% of the Wall St Journal subscribers are in ss households.
What's the source of this data? I don't recall the US census asking about my sexuality. Except for same sex marriage, there must be a lot of guessing about the rest. I doubt half of all gay couples are married. it is still a very difficult step for most to take.
The Census does a “household pulse survey” every year to a select portion of the population, and they added questions about LGBT identity to it in 2021.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/household-pulse-survey-updates-sex-question-now-asks-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity.html
As Ferris Bueller once said, “life moves pretty fast.” If you don’t stop and research your questions on Google, you could miss changes that happen.
Don't recall the question on the census, but from the article:
"Census data on same-sex couples covers less than a fifth of the LGBT population because it doesn’t include single or transgender people, according to Kerith Conron, research director at the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation and gender identity"
Many years ago when I was in college, I was taught that about 10% of the male population was either entirely or dominantly homosexual. That seemed high at the time, but I didn't have data to challenge it. There didn't, at that time, seem to be any good numbers re females. There have been many more surveys since then that all seem to have different results. I don't know what the current consensus is, but it still seems clear that (cis) heterosexuals remain the large majority of both the male and female population.
It’s because science historically has had a male bias. It’s why - until shockingly recently - medical science assumed all patients were male when doing drug tests, and why treatments for female-only problems were lacking for so long. I wouldn’t be surprised if researchers prior to maybe the 90s were told “you can’t ask that of a lady!” when they wanted to study female sexuality. (I don’t know how accurate it is but the movie Kinsey said that it was all well and good for them to publish a book on male sexuality but doing so for women was beyond the pale back in the 1950-1960s.)
Not a shock that medical science still doesn’t know much about the female orgasm, menopause or (apparently) how prevalent lesbianism is.
“… it still seems clear that (cis) heterosexuals remain the large majority of both the male and female population.”
I also have no idea why anybody would think this is in doubt, when schools are bursting at the seams with children from heterosexual pairings, when the vast majority of marriage licenses issued have a male and female person listed on them, and when still the majority of couple portrayals on mass media are of the male-female variety. It’s like everyone went from seeing a single gay couple kiss on TV or a single rack of pride clothing at Target to thinking “omg the whole world is gay.”
I have some gay tenants that have been tenants for 13 years and married for 12. I often laugh and comment that considering my several failed marriages, who has a better grasp on love...cis people or gay? (fwiw, I am still close friends with two ex wives). Well.....! Best Wishes, Traveller
The data come from the 2020 census question on relationship which says:
3. How is this person related to Person 1?
The response categories include:
1. Opposite-sex husband/wife/spouse
2. Opposite-sex unmarried partner
3. Same-sex husband/wife/spouse
4. Same-sex unmarried partner
There are undoubtedly more same-sex couples because this count only includes those that include the household head, those who live together and those who identify as spouse or partner. So, couples that have two separate residences would not show up. If two couples share a house, only one would be identified. Further, some couples may not identify as either "spouse" or "partner". My own sense of the data and the way it was collected is that there are certainly more couples but I doubt very much that it's five times the count
This just in: the WSJ made something up. Shocking!