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A recent Gallup poll compared levels of LGBT identification in younger versus older generations. The survey showed that the numbers increase with each generation — 3% of Baby Boomers, born 1956–1964, identify as LGBT; 5.1% of Generation X (1965–1980); 14.2% of Millenials (1981–1996), and a skyrocketing 23.1% of Generation Z (1997–2005).

What is causing this rise? Could it be mainly due to identification with non-traditional gender identities? Or are more people coming out as gay or lesbian?

Gallup broke down the generational data last year and found that the numbers for gay, lesbian, and transgender identification increased by small amounts (in terms of total number of people). For instance, in Gen X 1.3% of people identified as gay; in Millenials, 1.6%; in Gen Z, 2.6%. But the number of people coming out as bisexual (i.e., attracted to both men and women) has had a meteoric rise. In 2024, 1.9% of Gen Xers considered themselves bi. That tripled to 5.9% of Millennials, and almost tripled again for Gen Z, to 15.3%.

This presents a mystery: why are so many people now identifying as bisexual?

Politically, those on the right have tended to argue that increases in LGBT identification are a social fad — leftists jumping on the bandwagon for social clout, or a chance to feel special and wave a flag. Those on the left, on the other hand, have a tendency to argue that these sexual orientations and/or gender identities are fundamental. The progressive view is that the rising numbers of people coming out as LGBT are just a positive sign of greater acceptance: that in the younger generations, in large part because of growing social acceptance and legal protections, there is more space for people to be who they are.

There is also a third possibility: could it be that people are genuinely becoming more bisexual over time?

Clearer Thinking, an independent research organization for psychological research and education founded by Spencer Greenberg, ran a study to find out. We polled 608 respondents from different generations (using our participant recruitment platform Positly, as well as social media) to understand why bi identification has risen so much. We used our data to test three different theories — or as we call them, “bi-potheses”:

Social Bandwagoning — People might be identifying as bi because it's trendy or they think it’s a cool thing to be. If this is true, younger generations would show a much larger rise in their level of identification with bisexuality than their levels of bisexual attraction.
Increasing Acceptance — People might be feeling more free to identify themselves as something they already are. If this is true, we should find high levels of bisexual attraction consistently across all the generations, but a spike in self-identification in the younger generation.
Increasing Bisexual Feelings — People might actually be becoming more bisexual. If this is true, we would find a rise in attraction, identification, and behavior at the same time. If this is the case, it would raise more questions about why bisexuality is on the rise.

Before we show you what our study found, take a moment to ask yourself: which of the above do you think is true about the rise of bisexuality? Or, do you have a hypothesis of your own?

our eight measures of bisexuality

Bisexuality is an inherently complex (and sometimes misunderstood) concept. As such, we measured bisexuality for our study using eight different definitions simultaneously. In all cases we eliminated any respondents who identified as gay or lesbian, to be sure we were testing only for bisexuality. We also eliminated respondents who had never had a sexual partner, since not all definitions apply to them. The study was also only open to participants over 18.

Here are the eight definitions of bisexuality we applied:

Self-identified Bisexual — this is simply whether one assigns the "bisexual" label to oneself.
Sometimes Same-Sex Attracted (1-99%) — this means one reports that at least 1% of people they feel sexual attraction to are men, and at least 1% of people they feel sexual attraction to are women. This is a very low bar since even a small amount of attraction to their own sex would land them in this bucket.
Fairly Often Same-Sex Attracted (10-99%) — At least 10% of the people one feels sexual attraction to are men, and at least 10% are women.
Very Often Same-Sex Attracted (25-75%) — At least 25% of the people one feels sexually attracted to are men, and at least 25% are women.
Attracted to Same-Sex Body Parts — this counts a person as bisexual if they are a man who is sexually attracted to penises or if they are a woman who is sexually attracted to vaginas or breasts.
Wants Future Same-Gender Sex Encounter — this definition considers a person bisexual if they want to have a same-gender sexual encounter in the future.
Most-Recent Partner is of Same Gender — A person’s current (or, if currently single, most recent) sexual partner was of the same gender.
Has Had Same-Gender Sex — finally, this definition requires that a person has ever had sex with someone of the same gender.

Each of these definitions is binary, in the sense that it assigns each study participant either a 1 (they are bisexual by that definition) or a 0 (they aren't). Every one of these definitions has its own limitations. Given how widely people’s understanding of bisexuality varies, including multiple measures helps tease apart what is really changing across the generations.

As you may have noticed, some of our questions ask about attraction to the same sex, and others about attraction to the same gender. This might lead to situations where, for instance, members of a same-sex partnership who identify as genders other than those associated with their sex might not mark their partnership in the way the study intended. Although this was an oversight on our part, this discrepancy is unlikely to change the conclusions of the research because cases like these reflect a very small fraction of all responses.

In addition to the bisexuality questions, we asked each person about their gender and political affiliation to test whether bisexuality is related to either. The study was anonymous, conducted digitally, and respondents did not know the research questions we were testing. Thus, while lying was possible (e.g., out of embarrassment) there was no incentive to lie — so we expect that the vast majority of respondents were answering honestly.

RESULTS

If we construct a composite measure, measuring the average of our eight definitions, we get a result that looks like Gallup’s findings. Each generation does indeed seem to be more bisexual than the ones before.

Aggregate data doesn’t tell us much about what contributes to this rise. Let’s break it down by each definition.

For bisexual identification (the teal line in the chart above), our findings closely match the results of Gallup, but our respondents showed even higher rates than Gallup’s did: 3% for Baby Boomers (vs. 0.6%), 8% for Gen X (vs. 2%), 17% for Millennials (vs. 6%), and 23% for Gen Z (vs. 15%). The higher number we received may have to do with a politically progressive skew in our data. Whereas Gallup attempts to achieve a nationally representative US sample, ours is somewhat more likely to be left-leaning than random Americans. As we’ll see later, political affiliation has a link to bisexuality.

bisexual attraction

Let’s break these results down, beginning with attraction.

We asked respondents to rate what percent of the people they find sexually attractive are the same sex as them versus the opposite sex. As previously mentioned, when we measured the results, we set cutoffs at 1%, 10%, and 25% levels of attraction to the same sex, plus measuring people’s attraction to same-sex body parts.

Amazingly, almost 60% of Gen Z said at least 1% of people they are sexually attracted to are of the same sex. About 40% of respondents in older generations said they were attracted to the same sex with at least this frequency. This number lowers if we consider people attracted to their own sex more often. About a third of Gen X said that at least 10% of people they are attracted to are of their sex, and nearly a quarter said at least 25% of people they are attracted to are of their sex. The mean of previous generations is 17% and 6%, respectively.

Another (very different) way to investigate sexual attraction is to ask what body parts people find sexually attractive. Somewhat similar to these numbers, 26% of Gen Z and 14% of older-generation respondents across the spectrum say they are attracted to the body parts of their same sex.

If we take the mean of non-Gen Z generations, each of these attraction-based ratings has increased by at least 53% between previous generations and Gen Z. The number of people identifying as attracted to the same sex 25% or more of the time has increased a whopping 280%.

testing the bi-potheses

So, based on these results, what can we conclude about the three hypotheses for why bisexuality is increasing so much? That is, which bi-pothesis is true?

If social bandwagoning explained the massive increases in bisexual identification, people might say they were bisexual more often than in previous generations, but they wouldn’t rate comparatively higher on attraction to their own sex. Since we are seeing much higher levels of sexual attraction (and not just identity), it suggests the increasing bisexuality is unlikely to just be a bandwagon effect.
If increasing acceptance is the main reason for this increase, we would see a rise in bi identity over the generations that is much steeper than the rise in attraction. In other words, people would feel free to identify publicly with the attraction they felt all along. But comparing Gen Z respondents to the mean of other generations, self-identity went up 146%. Attraction to the same sex at least 10% of the time rose by 88%, and attraction to the same sex at least 25% of the time went up 280%. Lastly, attraction to same-sex body parts went up 98%. Thus, self-identity has indeed risen between generations, but not especially more than attraction — both have risen a great deal.
If increasing bisexual feelings is the reason for the rise in bisexual identity, we’d see a steep rise in both attraction and identity. Remarkably, we do! The numbers suggest that more people are coming out as bisexual because more people actually feel attracted to the same sex.

So, thus far, our third bi-pothesis appears to be supported! Younger people today seem to be having a lot more bisexual feelings than older generations, and feeling comfortable to identify with the attractions they hold.

If this were really true, however, wouldn't we also see more bisexual behavior among young people?

bisexual behavior

The answer is… we mostly do.

Of all the metrics we measured, we received the lowest overall numbers for the question of whether respondents’ most recent partner was or is of their same gender. However, compared to previous generations, Gen Z was still more than twice as likely to have their most recent partner be of the same gender.

Interestingly, this is one of the only two metrics that doesn’t rise across all generations. Baby boomers are slightly more likely to be living with a partner of the same gender than are Gen X or Millennials, although Gen Z again eclipses them by orders of magnitude.

The other measure that doesn’t consistently rise is the proportion of each generation who has had sex with someone of the same gender. We see an almost linear rise in same-gender sex through Baby Boomer, Gen X, and Millennial generations, but the line dips down when we get to Gen Z. Why? Does this disprove the hypothesis that bisexual attraction and action is rising about as fast as self-identification?

Probably not. Consider the fact that the oldest Gen Zers are 27 years old, and the youngest are only 12. Our study only measured participants 18 and up, but Gen Z still hasn’t had as much time to explore their sexuality as the older generations. It makes sense that they are less likely to have had a same gender partner, because they've simply had fewer partners.

Finally, it's time to look at the last set of correlations. How do these results change across self-identified gender and political orientation? Get ready for some impressive variation!

bisexuality and gender

While designing this study, our founder Spencer Greenberg posted this poll and this poll on Twitter, asking people to estimate what proportion of men versus women are bisexual. Most commonly, respondents thought that 5–10% of women and 5% or less of men are bisexual.

Respondents were right that more women than men identify as bi. But the average of our metrics is approximately three times higher than the most common responses given in the polls! 29% of women and 12% of men rate as bisexual, if we take the average of all eight of our metrics among our respondents. (The number of trans people responding to the survey was too small to make meaningful measurements for that group.) Though this is probably a little bit of an overestimate for the US population as a whole because respondents in our study were likely somewhat more left-leaning than the US population broadly.

bisexuality and politics

Our study looked at one last metric. How does bisexuality vary across the political spectrum?

The results here are interesting. While about 27% of people left of center identified as bisexual by an average of all eight of our metrics, only about 10% of those right of center scored the same way. This held true across most individual metrics: attraction, identity, and behavior all decreased the further to the right we look. The only metric that showed a different pattern was the number of people currently with a same-sex partner, which stayed constant across the political spectrum.

Are conservatives less likely to explore their sexual preferences, or less likely to develop them in the first place? Do they marry younger to partners of the opposite sex? More research is needed here.

* * *

Our study shows that bisexuality genuinely seems to have increased tremendously across generations. By measures of attraction, identification, and behavior, younger people appear to be more bisexual today than they were back in the past.

Why? It's hard to say for sure — perhaps greater social acceptance of bisexuality actually leads to more bisexual attraction. The reverse might also be true: that lack of social acceptance, or shame around such attraction, might lead to people nipping such feelings in the bud and not exploring them. But, that's just one hypothesis. One thing we can say for sure, based on our findings and those of other research, is that bisexuality is far more common than most believe — and if the trend continues, becoming even more common by the decade.

Published Mar 11, 2025