During Gay History Month, We Have To Make Sure Gay and Lesbian Citizens Count

By Heather Gilligan, for The Progressive magazine

We’re in the midst of Gay History Month, an ideal time for this question: How much progress has been made in the 40 years since the gay liberation movement began?

Gays and lesbians entered American public life in the late 1960s, with the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, sparked by a police raid on a gay bar. Since then, an intense campaign, marked by academic study, political lobbying and anti-defamation work has demanded recognition and respect for gays and lesbians.

Much has changed; much has stayed the same.

When Gallup began polling Americans in the 1970s about their views on gays and lesbians, 43 percent agreed that “homosexual sex should be legal.” As of Gallup’s 2008 poll, 57 percent agreed that gay sex should be legal.

That’s an improvement, but I would have expected more after 40 years of work for gay rights.

What doesn’t seem to be improving is polarization. “Homosexuality emerges as the most divisive of 16 major social and cultural issues,” Gallup says. More Americans agree about abortion and doctor-assisted suicide than gay rights.

One possible source of this continued divisiveness: Gays and lesbians are still written out of the official record of life in the United States, the constitutionally mandated, once a decade census.

The 2000 census did count households with unmarried same-sex couples. But it did not count single gay people, and the Census Bureau says it has no plans to count married same-sex couples in Massachusetts, California and Connecticut in the 2010 census.

Even still, the 2000 census succeeded in challenging some stereotypes about gay and lesbian life in the United States. Did you know that the largest number of same-sex couples with children lives in Mississippi? And did you know that gay men make less than straight men, on average?

Such information challenges misperceptions that gay men are largely wealthy, or that most same-sex couples with children live in accepting places like San Francisco. These stereotypes wrongly suggest that gays and lesbians don’t need protections of their rights because they are already protected or already powerful.

Facts refute other stereotypes just as well. Not until this year could a study based on civil unions in Vermont prove that legal status renders gay couples as stable and happy as heterosexual couples. This study concretely refutes the idea that same-sex relationships are pathological, says Esther Rothblum, Ph.D., one of its authors.

We need more solid data like this, and the best way to obtain it is for the Census Bureau to stop erasing gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people.

Surely we can agree at least that all U.S. citizens, gay or not, should be equally counted.