Gregory Rodriguez wrote a great piecein the LA Times yesterday highlighting a recent gay demographics study conducted by Gary Gates at the UCLA Law’s Williams Institute. The study found, among many things, that the gay population has been steadily diversifying. The number of out gay couples has also increased tremendously over the past decade–especially in non-urban and middle America. These demographic changes have been linked to growing tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality.
Some highlights:
In 1998 a Gallup poll found that only 33% of Americans thought that homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal. By 2007, that figure had risen to 59%...
Gates’ study shows that the number of openly gay couples in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1990, and the biggest increases are in the country’s more socially conservative areas. Utah is the poster state. Between 1990 and 2006, for example, it went from having the 38th-highest concentration of same-sex couples in the country to 14th highest. In that same time period, the percentage of gay couples who lived in large cities declined from 45% to 23%.
Even more counterintuitive, from 2000 to 2006, states that banned same-sex marriage had above-average increases in the number of gay couples. And places where voter referendums went against same-sex marriages saw even larger increases...
Counterintuitive indeed. I would have thought that there would be a migration of gay couples to the Northeast from the states with anti-gay legislation. I’m sure that’s what many had in mind when writing and supporting such legislation. But it’s backfired. I find it humorous that the states trying to deny the existence of gay couples are now having more and more to deal with. Such a disconnect between the law and reality cannot continue forever (sadly though in the states with anti-gay amendments, it will take at least a generation).
More from the article:
...The larger trend is simply that as more gays come out, they don’t need to change or assimilate to fit into the mainstream because they are already very much a part of it.
"The demographic characteristics of the gay population are converging with those of the mainstream," Gates says. If you’re from a state like Utah or Nebraska, chances are you’re going to share a lot with your neighbors whether you’re straight or gay: "They’re rural," Gates says, "they’re religious, and they’re Republican."
So what does this all mean for American culture at large?
"Society is beginning to say that being gay is not such a big deal," Gates says. "What that means for gays is that homosexuality won’t have the centrality to their identity it once did. Being gay then becomes one of a variety of an individual’s competing identities."...
Gates doesn’t believe that these trends spell an end of gay "associational" life. The process he’s describing is not unlike the one experienced by so many immigrant or minority groups in America that fought against discrimination, moved beyond their enclaves and then felt a little sad that they lost the embracing sense of uniqueness and community that they once enjoyed.
As gays meld into the broader population, places like West Hollywood and the Castro district in San Francisco will inevitably lose some of their appeal. As more gays come out in more places, the diversity of homosexual politics and lifestyles will come out with them, and the tolerant will multiply.
For some of the pioneers from the edgy, embattled, ecstatic "good old days," this may be bittersweet. "But isn’t that what everyone wanted 20 years ago?" Gates asks. "Just to be treated like everyone else?"
I’ve expressed similar sentiments before. It still surprises me to see other gays expressing hostility towards messages of assimilation. Some have called me a bigot at DailyKosfor expressing such messages, which is utterly baffling to me. But again, it seems the statistics compiled by Gates shows that the assimilationist view is winning out.