Last year, several researchers – including me – found that fewer U.S. young adults were identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in 2024 and 2025 than just a few years before.
At that point, though, the 2025 data for the nationally representative Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS), administered by the CDC, was incomplete, covering only January and February. Another survey had only a sample from June 2025, and it had changed its design from earlier data collections.
To get the data for the whole year, we’d have to wait until the next BRFSS datafile was released. That would be more definitive for three reasons: The sample size would be much larger (and thus less prone to random variation), the BRFSS design stayed the same over the years unlike the other survey with the June data, and the year comparisons would be equal (comparing full years to each other instead of full years to just a few months in 2025).
That moment arrived last week when the BRFSS released its 2025 data.
The results were not what I expected.