One thing that often puzzles modern people about the ancient Mediterranean world, which I study, is the fact that certain kinds of sexual and romantic attraction and relationships between people of the same gender are attested so widely and spoken of so openly in the ancient sources. This seems very strange to many modern people, who assume that same-gender attraction is a rare phenomenon that only a tiny minority of the population experiences.
Contemporary evidence, though, is starting to show that same-gender attraction may be much more common than many people have previously assumed. Last week, on 17 February 2022, the polling agency Gallup published the results of a new survey, which found that no less than 7.1% of all adults in the United States now openly identify as some variety of LGBT+. This is quite significant, because this is nearly double the percentage it was ten years ago in 2012 when Gallup first started polling the question. Especially striking is the fact that, apparently, in the U.S., around 20.8% of adult members of Generation Z (my own generation) now identify as LGBT+, with the overwhelming majority of that percentage identifying as bisexual.
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