Written by: Robert Santos, Director
Happy Pride Month, everyone! In June our nation celebrates the accomplishments and resilience of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) community. To further that celebration, I want to talk about how we at the U.S. Census Bureau are expanding our knowledge on measuring sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).
The LGBTQIA+ population is a growing and a beautifully diversifying part of our American landscape. Now, the Census Bureau?s mission is to provide quality information about our nation?s people and families. This necessarily includes our LGBTQIA+ population, which is found across all demographic, social, and economic groups in the United States.
In all our Census Bureau demographic surveys, as well as the decennial census, we collect information about the relationship of each person in a household to one central person. These data reveal same-sex couple households, i.e., households containing a same-sex married or unmarried partner of the householder. According to the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year estimates, there were about 1.3 million same-sex couple households in the United States. Roughly 741,000 (or 57 percent) were married, while 537,000 were unmarried. To add to this diversity, about 31 percent of married same-sex couples were interracial in 2022. This is much higher (by over one-half) than the 19 percent of married opposite-sex couples that were interracial.
Continue reading for more information.
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