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After years of wild guess and flawed estimations, Gallup has attempted to get some hard data on just how many gay, lesbian, and bisexual people there are in America. So how good are their are numbers?

The polling company took state-by-state surveys of all 50 states and District of Columbia, asking one simple question: "Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?" With more than 200,000 responses over the course of six months, this is a pretty large sample for a seemingly simple question that has yet to be definitively answered. Gallup also found that outside of a few outliers, the results were remarkably consistent across the entire nation. Averaging all the state polls together gives you a nationwide average of 3.5 percent, and every state in the union (but not D.C.) is within two percentage points of that average. That's also right around the margin of error for the polls.

Does that seem right? Well, no one really knows, honestly, because no one has ever attempted a true census-like survey of the whole nation before. As many LGBT writers and activists have pointed out, for years many simply just went with a guesstimate of around 10 percent of the country being not straight; a number that probably seemed way too high or way too low depending on where you lived and who you hung out with. In a previous Gallup poll young people and women have even guessed that the number could be as high as 30 percent, proving that people aren't really good at estimating these kinds of things.