If you’re straight, you may be unaware that members of the LGBTQ community are still widely discriminated against by their co-workers, unless you’re one of the 31 percent of people actively participating in that discrimination.
Broadly reports on GLAAD’s annual Accelerating Acceptance study, which asks participants to share their comfort level with not just their colleagues, but their LGBTQ relatives and neighbors:
“To the non-LGBTQ respondents, we ask on a scale how uncomfortable they feel about ‘people who are exploring or questioning their sexual orientation,’” GLAAD representative Matt Goodman tells Broadly. “The average of that response was just over 31 percent feeling ‘very comfortable’ or ‘somewhat uncomfortable’ with the above question.”
That sucks, but the numbers also showed slight improvement in the last few years. For example, 37 percent of non-LGBTQ people responded that they were uncomfortable with “learning my child had a lesson on LGBTQ history” in 2014. The 2016 response to that same question showed only 34 percent were uncomfortable with the same notion. And there’s this:
Everyone’s getting gayer! In the age group 18-34, about 20 percent of people identify as LGBTQ. To put that in perspective, only about 5 percent of people over 72 identify the same way. It’ll be a few years before the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency and his administration’s attacks on the LGBTQ community can be measurably seen through a survey, and the increase in tolerance appears to have stalled between 2015 and 2016. But with this many young people coming up and coming out, we may as well feel tentatively hopeful that there’s a rainbow ahead.