Massive Survey Shows White People Least Likely to be LGBT

Poorer blacks and Asians are more likely to be gay than wealthier whites, a controversial study claimed yesterday.

A Gallup survey – said to be the largest of its kind ever undertaken in America – estimated that 3.4 per cent of US adults saw themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT).

That figure consisted of 4.6 per cent of African-Americans, 4.3 per cent of Asians, 4 per cent of Hispanics – but only 3.2 per cent of whites.

In contrast to earlier, smaller studies, researchers also found that Americans with the lowest levels of education were most likely to say they were gay.

A similar pattern was found in wealth, with more than 5 per cent of those with annual incomes of under £15,000 identified as gay compared with 2.8 per cent earning more than £37,000 a year.

And while 21 per cent of American adults earn more than £56,000 a year, only 16 per cent of gay people claimed to earn that much.

The survey – based on interviews with more than 121,000 people – contradicts the perception that lesbians and gays are mostly white, urban and affluent, said lead author Gary Gates.

‘Contemporary media often think of LGBT people as disproportionately white, male, urban and pretty wealthy,’ said Mr Gates of the University of California, Los Angeles. ‘But this data reveals that relative to the general population, the LGBT population has a larger proportion of non-white people and clearly is not overly wealthy.’

The survey revealed a slight gender difference – 3.6 per cent of women identified themselves as lesbian or gay, compared with 3.3 per cent of men.This discrepancy was particularly marked among younger adults, aged 18 to 29, where 8.3 per cent of women said they were LGBT compared with only 4.6 per cent of men.

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