Are a Quarter of Young Americans Actually LGBTQ (etc.)? Don’t Bet on It

Why the surge in LGBT identity deserves a closer look

Last month, in an NRO column jocularly titled “We Need a Return of the Jocks,” I mentioned that around 20 percent of young Americans now identify as gay — or, more specifically, as members of the “increasingly broad and alphabetically lengthening LGBTQIA etc. community.” Apparently, I spoke too soon and underestimated this figure. According to new data reported in The Hill, the actual percentage of LGBT young Americans is closer to 25–26 percent. For rather obvious reasons, this is worth discussing.

First, let’s review the numbers themselves. According to figures originally sourced from the Orwellian-sounding Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) administered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 75 percent or so of American high-school students now identify as heterosexual. Roughly 3 percent — combined — ID as gay and lesbian, while 12.2 percent identify as bisexual, 5.2 percent as “questioning,” and 3.9 percent as “other” (trans, nonbinary, etc. would presumably fall here). In what may be a measure of reading comprehension rather than sexual openness, fully 1.8 percent of responding young scholars said that they could not understand the question. Overall, “the number of LGBTQ students went from 11% in 2015 to 26% in 2021.”

Several things are notable here. Obviously, there is simply no genetic or biological explanation for a surge like this one. The percentage of Baby Boomers who identify as LGBT is 2.7 percent, and the main change in the “stock” of the United States since the 1960s and 1970s has been large-scale in-migration of Latinos from some of the world’s more conservative Catholic societies.