Poll Claims Number of LGBT People Is Increasing

How many LGBT people are there?

It's the eternal question. That ages-old rule of thumb coined by famed researcher Alfred Kinsey, that one in every 10 people is gay, has long been in dispute. The Census counts a lot of things, but not LGBT people. So we're left to find answers from things like the latest Gallup Poll released today.

Gallup reports the number of self-identified LGBT people has increased from last year. Some 4.5 percent of the U.S. population say they're LGBT, up from 4.1 percent last year.

Gallup asks the question as part of its daily tracking poll, giving it a large enough sample by the end of a year to make an estimate of the total LGBT population. So by the end of 2017, it appeared that 4.5 percent of people said they were LGBT, and that includes 5.1 percent of women who say they're LGBT, compared to 3.9 percent of men.

That the number is increasing isn't new. When Gallup announced last year that 4.1 percent were LGBT, the number was up from 3.5 percent in 2012.

No, there isn't an increase in LGBT babies; at least no one is making that claim. One thing that's changing is the culture, with acceptance of LGBT people on the rise compared to 2012. More and more people feel safe telling a pollster they're LGBT. Also, younger generations are defining what it means to be LGBT less narrowly than their elders.

Even in 2012, 5.8 percent of millennials said they were LGBT. That grew to 7.3 percent in 2012, and in the latest poll the number is at 8.2 percent. Now we're getting closer to that old one-in-10 axiom.

There are other polls, though, that find a much larger number of LGBT people. GLAAD commissions an annual survey by the Harris Poll that last year found 12 percent of the total U.S. population is LGBT, including a whopping 20 percent of those ages 18-34. In the U.K., the BBC found that a full one third of those ages 16 to 22 do not identify as straight.