Support for LGBTQ Issues Falls From Biden-Era High

From the start of the gay rights movement in the 1960s until 2022, support for gay marriage and LGBTQ acceptance consistently trended upward. However, that trend has reversed for the first time in more than half a century, as support for same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ issues is now trending down.

Gallup has been polling Americans on these issues since 1996. At the time, only 27% said same-sex marriages should be valid. In 2001, when Gallup started asking about the morality of same-sex relationships, only 40% said gay and lesbian relations were morally acceptable. Following a consistent upward trend over the next 25 years, both figures peaked in 2022, with 71% saying same-sex marriages should be valid and that gay and lesbian relations are morally acceptable.

While there had been one- or two-year troughs in which support for same-sex marriage declined by a few percent, support always rebounded within three years and returned to an upward trend.

That has not been the case since 2022. Following the high level of support that year, the share of Americans who support same-sex marriage has declined, falling to 65% who think such marriages should be valid and 62% who think gay and lesbian relations are morally acceptable.

Support for transgender-related issues has also declined. Gallup started asking in 2021 whether changing one’s gender is morally acceptable, and 46% said it was. In the latest 2026 survey, only 38% said it was morally acceptable.

This decline in support for LGBTQ issues since 2022 has largely come from Republicans. In 2022, 56% of Republicans said gay and lesbian relations were morally acceptable. In 2023, that share dropped to 41% and has since declined to 35%. Independents’ support for these issues has declined somewhat as well, from their peak in 2021 when 74% said the same, to 64% now. The share of Democrats saying gay and lesbian relations are morally acceptable has also declined slightly, to 81% from 86% in 2025, though a one-year decline is less significant than the multiyear declines seen among Republicans and independents.

This decline in support comes despite a recent uptick in the number of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual. In data from 2025 Gallup polls, 9% identified as LGBTQ+, up from 7.2% in 2022 and 3.5% in 2012, when Gallup first started asking the question. The vast majority of these were people who identified as bisexual, with 58% of LGBTQ identifiers saying they were bisexual, while only 16% said they were lesbian, 17.4% gay and 12.1% transgender.

The increase in LGBTQ identification, at least since 2020, also came largely from those who identified as bisexual, the Gallup poll found. While the percentage of Americans who identify as transgender rose from 0.6% to 1.1% between 2020 and 2025, the share who identify as bisexual rose from 3.1% to 5.3%.

Most of this increase comes in younger-age demographics. Among those 65 and older, only 2.3% identify as LGBTQ+. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 23% do.

The gap is also significant between younger and middle-aged adults. While 23% of 18- to 29-year-olds identify as LGBTQ+, only 10.4% of 30- to 49-year-olds do. The difference is especially pronounced among those who identify as bisexual: 16.1% of 18- to 29-year-olds identify as bisexual, compared with 5.6% of 30- to 49-year-olds. By contrast, the share identifying as lesbian or gay is closer between the two groups, at 5.4% among 18- to 29-year-olds and 3.6% among 30- to 49-year-olds.

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