While stereotypical gay codifiers remain white and male, a recent Gallup polls says the reality is otherwise. According to new research from Gallup and the Williams Institute at UCLA's law school released on Thursday, more than 121,000 people were surveyed in "the largest single study of the distribution of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population in the U.S. on record." New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wonders how the results came to say that young black, Hispanic and Asian men were more likely to identify as being as part of the LGBT community than whites.
The poll found that nonwhites are more likely than whites to answer "yes."
And, although, in general, younger people were more likely to answer affirmatively than older ones, young black men (those between 18 and 29 years old) were 56 percent more likely than young white men to answer yes. Young Hispanic men were 49 percent more likely than young white men to answer with a yes and young Asian men were 23 percent more likely than young white men to answer yes.
This wide discrepancy did not exist among young women. Young black women were only 12 percent more likely than young white women to say yes, and young Asian and Hispanic women were less likely to say yes than young white women.
(The only group in which older people were more likely to answer yes than younger people was among Asian men.)
It's a head-scratcher.
Read Charles M. Blow's entire piece at the New York Times.
Editor's note: The headline and introduction of this posting have been corrected to reflect that fact that while the source article says young people of color were more likely to identify as gay, there is no indication of an upward trend in the source article, nor is it true that 56 percent of young men of color identified as LGBT.
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