Newsweek bisexuality
The number of American adults who spot as LGBTQ+ has skyrocketed in recent years, but there's one group that's been driving the uptick.
Younger bisexual women were largely behind the increase, with percent of today's U.S. adults now identifying as LGBTQ+.
Why It Matters
Gen Z has had an increasingly different connection with sexuality than their elders.
According to a recent PRRI report, nearly 30 percent of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ+. That's a high figure when you take into account Baby Boomers only identified as LGBTQ+ 4 percent of the hour. Even compared to millennials, Gen Z is a notably more sexually fluid generation, as millennials only identified as LGBTQ+ 16 percent of the time.
What To Know
The Gallup survey has tracked LGBTQ+ identification for 12 years, and the rates of adults identifying with the community has nearly tripled in that time.
While today's young adults are more likely to identify as woman loving woman, gay, bisexual and transgender, the most notable increase driving the shift is due to more primarily young women identifying as bisexual.
In , percent o
Bisexual people—those who are sexually attracted to men and women—have the worst health outcomes of any sexuality, scientists found.
While lesbian, male lover and bisexual (LGB) patients as a whole trial health outcomes twice as poor as heterosexual people, bisexuals are the worst affected among this already marginalized community, according to a new study published on July 24 in the Journal of Sex Research, with bisexual women four times more likely than heterosexuals to endure from long-term issues.
The researchers suggest that this may be a result of biphobia, or discrimination from heterosexuals as well as gay and lesbian people.
"Minority stress could put fluid individuals at increased exposure of psychological problems and negative behaviors—and ultimately at greater risk of poorer health outcomes," Carrie Llewellyn, head of the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Brighton and Sussex Medical College and co-author of the paper, said in a statement.
"Our results suggest that there is a greater prevalence of long-standing physical health cond
Steven and Lori are what you might call the marrying type. They met on the first day o&#; freshman orientation at the University of Chicago in By Thanksgiving, she was taking him home to meet her family; the following year they got engaged. This May they celebrated their first wedding anniversary.
In their one-bedroom apartment in Hyde Park, a collegiate affair down to the cinder-block bookshelves, Steven and Lori, now both 24, have developed an almost telepathic relationship. If anyone tells one of them anything. they joke, the other knows about it immediately. But during their freshman year, Steven says, he used to go off on his own every so often. "I think I told you I was going to a Democratic Socialist meeting," he recalls to Loft. He was really going to a campus gay and lesbian support group. Steven had come to college with a "practically nonexistent" romantic life, but a dear attraction to both men and women. After one of the group meetings, he decided to come clean to Lori.
STEVEN: [I said] Lori, I have something to tell you.
Lori: At which point, I consideration he had cance
I didn't come out to myself, or anyone else, until I was in my early 20s. I am queer and always have been queer but I was raised in a world that assumed my heterosexuality, so it took a lot of time to think of myself as anything beyond that.
I identify with both bisexuality and pansexuality, but because I do own romantic and sexual attraction to people who are the opposite sex to me, I kind of fumbled through my teenage years. It was OK to fancy boys openly, and so I did and they were the people I dated and had sex with. It's only on reflection that I realize quite how many queer experiences I had as a teenager; from making out with and sleeping with women to all sorts of nuances beyond that. But they were going adorable much unacknowledged by me and the other people I was interacting with.
I didn't grow up in a space that was actively queerphobic or homophobic; my parents are very warm and welcoming people. But throughout my childhood and teenage years I can't think of a single bisexual character who wasn't demonized or oversexualized. I didn't hear the term non-binary until I w