Abstract
This chapter presents new estimates of the prevalence of self-identified gay men and lesbians (and bisexuals) from recent, population-representative datasets in the United States. The data presented in this chapter provide context for a series of chapters in this Handbook covering sociodemographic outcomes of sexual minorities, including residential location, labor market, and family/partnership outcomes. Many prevalence estimates have been reported elsewhere in the literature, but are based on sexual behavior as opposed to sexual orientation identity (e.g., Kinsey et al. 1948, Binson et al. 1995), use older data (e.g., Laumann et al. 1994; Black et al. 2000), and/or focus on just one or two individual datasets (e.g., Dilley et al. 2005; Keyes et al. 2007, and others). My goal in this chapter is to present a series of prevalence estimates in a standardized way across several recent, independently drawn datasets to document consistent patterns. I also examine whether estimates of the prevalence of gay men and lesbians differ systematically by demographic characteristics such as sex, age, race, and education.
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Notes
- 1.
 For an excellent source of information on available datasets with information on sexual orientation, see http://gaydata.org
- 2.
 Immediately preceding the question about sexual orientation, NESARC also included direct questions about same-sex sexual behavior and same-sex sexual attraction.
- 3.
 Previous work has used data from the 2002 to 2006 waves of these data and has reached extremely similar conclusions to those presented below (Keyes et al. 2007).
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Carpenter, C.S. (2013). The Prevalence of Gay Men and Lesbians. In: Baumle, A. (eds) International Handbook on the Demography of Sexuality. International Handbooks of Population, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5512-3_11
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