What percentage of gays have gotten married?

What percentage of gays have gotten married? June 23, 2017


Gallup now has some data about same-sex marriage.

According to Gallup’s survey, 10.2% of LGBT adults are married to someone of the same sex.

Interestingly, this is fewer than the number of LGBT adults who are married to someone of the opposite sex: 13.1%.  Gallup says that this is because half of LGBT folks are bisexual!  (What are the implications of that fact?  For pastoral care?  For the same-sex marriage debate?)

Other findings:  Of all LGBT adults who are cohabiting, 61% are married to each other.  The number of domestic partnerships has plummeted to 6.6%.  But the number of gays who are not living with a partner, who consider themselves “single,” has shot up, to 55.7%.

From In US, 10.2% of LGBT Adults Now Married to Same-Sex Spouse | Gallup:

Two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that states could not prohibit same-sex marriages, 10.2% of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) adults in the U.S. are married to a same-sex spouse. That is up from 7.9% in the months prior to the Supreme Court decision in 2015, but only marginally higher than the 9.6% measured in the first year after the ruling. . . .

As the percentage of LGBT adults in same-sex marriages has increased over the past two years, the percentage in same-sex domestic partnerships has fallen sharply from 12.8% before the Supreme Court ruling to 6.6%.

About half of the decline in same-sex domestic partnerships can be explained by the increase in same-sex marriages. The rest of the decline could mean that others formerly in same-sex domestic partnerships may have stopped living together, or no longer consider a same-sex cohabitant as a “partner.”

As a result of these shifts, Gallup estimates that 61% of same-sex, cohabiting couples in the U.S. are now married, up from 38% before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in June 2015, and 49% one year ago.

An increasing percentage of LGBT adults now identify their marital status as single or never married. That has always been the dominant status among LGBT individuals, but has increased from 47.4% to 55.7% over the last two years.

LGBT Americans are still more likely to be married to an opposite-sex spouse (13.1%) than a same-sex spouse (10.2%), but the gap is narrowing. According to prior research on LGBT identification, roughly half of those who self-identify as LGBT are bisexual, helping explaining the high proportion of LGBT individuals who are married to opposite-sex partners.

[Keep reading. . .]

Illustration by ** RCB ** [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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