While bisexual women are often stereotyped as sleeping with women for male attention, or just going through a phase en route to permanent heterosexuality, the opposite is presumed of bisexual men: that they are simply confused or semi-closeted gay men. Some of that might be simply due to phallocentrism. In short: For some, “lesbian” is not inclusive enough (though there are also self-identified lesbians who date beyond the binary, and are expanding the potential for what their identity can mean).īut that doesn’t explain why young men haven’t been identifying as queer, bisexual, or fluid at similarly high rates. For some assigned-female queer people, identifying as a lesbian might not make sense when their potential dating pool could include not only cis women, but trans women, nonbinary people, and transmasculine people.
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Young people aren’t only more likely to identify as bisexual, queer, fluid, or otherwise open to multiple genders - they’re more likely to identify outside of the gender binary themselves. One is that, for some young queer people, labels like “gay” or “lesbian,” which imply binary-gender sexual orientations, can seem stale and old-fashioned in a world where we’ve begun to think beyond the binary. What the survey also makes clear, however, is that while young women are now more likely to identify as queer or bisexual, they’re much less likely to identify as lesbians. LGBTQ people are more likely to be female in general (55% women, 41% men, and 4% nonbinary), and women, in particular, have long been presumed to consider themselves more sexually fluid - which this new data seems to confirm. These results are in line with previously reported trends regarding younger generations and sexual identity: Millennials and Gen Z'ers are more likely to identify as queer, no labels, or not 100% straight. The majority of those who identified their sexual orientation as queer are also young - 55% are between 18 and 29 - and either female (39%), genderqueer/nonbinary (31%), agender (11%), or prefer to self-describe (9%). (Gay men also skew slightly younger, though with a more even distribution across age ranges.) Twenty-one percent of lesbians are 60 and above, compared to just 9% of bisexuals. Sixty-nine percent of lesbians are 40 and older, while only 29% of bisexual people are in the same age range. And while bisexual women tend to be younger, lesbians are the opposite: Only 14% are between the ages of 18 and 29.
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Speaking of gay men and women - twice as many people identify as gay than lesbian (32% to 16%).
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Those who identify as queer are 40% nonwhite.Īlthough young, bisexual women of color make up a large portion of the LGBTQ American population, they aren’t necessarily reflected in popular cultural conceptions of LGBTQ people, which still tend to be dominated primarily by white gay men and women. Thirty-eight percent of bisexual Americans are also nonwhite, greater than the number of gay or lesbian respondents of color (24% and 26%, respectively). Nearly half of this group is between the ages of 18 and 29 - 46% of them.