Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
For this edition of the Rural Index, I tried tracking down data on rural queer people, but what I found instead was a large information gap.
Last week on Yonder Radio, my colleague Ilana Newman and I dedicated a section of the radio hour to Pride Month, where we discussed the black hole that is data on rural LGBTQIA+ folks. (Ilana and I are both queer women who have spent parts of our lives in small-town America.) Because most stories about queer people focus on urban centers, I wanted to highlight where there might be surprising concentrations of queer people in America, or where their experiences might challenge stereotypes.
I had a grand vision – perhaps a listicle. I wanted to identify and map the nation’s gayest small towns. But the data didn’t hold up. While surveys on LGBTQIA+ Americans do exist, most of them do not include responses by geography, and the few that do include a measure of rurality have methodological challenges. More on that later.
Note: I use the term “queer” as an umbrella term for all LGBTQIA+ individuals.
One of the oft-cited surveys on social trends comes from Gallup, which found an increase in the number of queer-identifying respondents in their 2025 survey of more than 14,000 adults. Since Gallup began collecting data on LGBTQIA+ people over a dozen years ago, the share of the population identifying as such has nearly tripled.
Between 2023 and 2025 alone, the percentage of adults identifying as queer grew one percentage point, from 8% in 2023 to 9% in 2025, the latest year of available data. The majority of queer-identifying respondents said they were bisexual (56%), while 21% identified as gay, 14% identified as lesbian, and 13% identified as transgender. But this widely-cited Gallup data doesn’t break down where respondents live, making it impossible to perform any kind of geographic analysis.
There is, however, a single survey on rural queer youth organized by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for suicide awareness for LGBTQIA+ youth. The Trevor Project’s 2021 survey on nearly 35,000 youth found that half of queer young people in rural areas say that their community was unaccepting of them compared to only a quarter of queer youth in urban and suburban areas.
But the Trevor Project’s rural category was based on a self-identification definition of rurality, which asked how respondents would describe their community, offering an option between urban, suburban, or small town (rural). While this definition of rural is not inherently bad, it does capture a different population than the geographic definitions of rural that I use in my data analyses. People who identify as rural might have different attitudes and experiences than those who do not, even if they live in the same town, for instance.
Another source on queer people that relies on a self-identification measure of rurality is a 2023 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly. This analysis of data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) found that rural-identifying people are less likely to have high estimations of queer people and are less likely to support queer friendly policies than those who identify with other geographies. But the author found a “surprisingly small” effect size between the two groups, meaning that the statistically significant differences between the two groups were not that large.
Support for queer rights was measured using five items on the ANES questionnaire that asked respondents to rank how they felt about queer issues on a scale from 0 (very cool or unfavorable feelings) to 100 (very warm or favorable feelings). The author then created an index of overall support based on responses to these five ratings.
Although rural-identifying people had less favorable feelings towards queer-friendly policies and people compared to people who identified with other geographies, they still ranked above the midpoint of the index, suggesting that, on average, rural-identifying respondents were still somewhat supportive of LGBTQIA+ rights.
It probably wouldn’t be surprising, however, to learn that a greater share of people living in rural areas were unsupportive of queer rights compared to their urban and suburban counterparts, especially given the average voting patterns of nonmetro counties. But we just don’t have the data to support any clear geographic conclusions.
The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) was the only data source I could find that could potentially allow for a geography-based analysis of rural queer people. The ACS captures county-level figures on the number of same-sex householders, but the sample sizes are so small that the margin of error is often larger than the actual estimates themselves, making it impossible for me to identify America’s gayest small towns. That’s why the map for this week’s Rural Index is just an abyss.
We face two overlapping problems when it comes to data on rural queer folks. (1) Data on queer people is generally lacking. (2) Data on rural people is generally lacking. When those two populations overlap, it can be especially hard to find adequate data to describe the population.
For better or worse, being able to describe populations is important in our world because legible groups are easier to advocate for. Information is power. And when there is a gap in information, or an abyss, if you will, it can make resources and funding hard to come by. Nonprofits and advocacy groups use data to describe the populations they serve on donor reports and grant applications, for example. It’s hard to push for policy attention when we can’t describe where people are, who they are, or what they value.
The post I Tried to Identify the Gayest Small Towns, but the Data Fell Apart appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
