Q&A on the News

Q: Same sex marriages have been very much in the news lately. However, I haven’t seen any statistics on how many homosexuals there are in the U.S. Are there estimates on this? If so, what are the numbers?

—Frances Jordan, Norcross

A: A Gallup Daily Tracking Survey conducted from June through September of last year and released in October, found that 3.4 percent of adults in the U.S. identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT), Gary Gates, the distinguished scholar at the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA's School of Law, told Q&A on the News in an email. Gates, who co-authored "The Gay and Lesbian Atlas," wrote a 2011 report called "How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender?" Taking data from a variety of nationally representative surveys, he found that "about 3.8 percent of adults identified as LGBT," he wrote. "In that same report, I found that more than 8 percent of Americans say that they have had a same-sex sexual experience and an estimated 11 percent indicate at least some sexual attraction to individuals of the same sex," Gates wrote. In his 2011 report, Gates wrote that there are approximately 9 million LGBT Americans. The Gallup survey found that 3.6 percent of women and 3.3 percent of men identified themselves as LGBT. It also reported that 3.2 percent of white Americans, 4.6 percent of African-Americans, 4 percent of Hispanics (U.S. population) and 4.3 percent of Asians (U.S. population) identify as LGBT.