Social Scientists Discover that Single Gays and Lesbians Exist

Most LGBT Americans have never married or lived with a romantic partner

It shouldn’t be a revelation. Not all gays or lesbians are in romantic relationships, or even trying to find romantic partners. Neither are all bisexuals or people who are transgender or people of other sexual or gender minorities. But if you were to read the scholarly research on sexual and gender minorities (SGM), that might come as a surprise. Social scientists are obsessed with the romantic relationships, marriages, and families of SGM people who are partnered.

Maybe that should not be so unexpected, since popular writings and conversations also seem to be dominated by the concerns of only one subset of SGM people — those who are partnered. Matrimania, it seems, is hardly the exclusive domain of heterosexuals and the people who write about them.

And yet, as of 2017, more than half — 56% — of LGBT Americans had always been single. They had never been married to a partner of any gender, and had never lived with a partner, either.

In what I consider to be a breakthrough moment, an important article in the prestigious Journal of Marriage and Family acknowledged that single SGM people exist and that their family ties have been almost entirely ignored. Every 10 years, the journal publishes…