Three celebrities — Shay Mitchell, Madonna, and Emily Ratajkowski — have all used TikTok videos to apparently come out online as LGBT in under a week, even as some experts say popular culture is driving growing numbers of young people to identify as other than heterosexual.
Actress Shay Mitchell on Thursday posted a video about being bisexual, amassing 4.6 million views. Days later, singer Madonna posted her own video seemingly coming out as gay; that video has racked up a stunning 31.2 million views. And by Tuesday, model and actress Emily Ratajkowski snagged 1.7 million views of her own with a video like Mitchell’s also announcing she’s bisexual.
Polling data show that “LGBTQ” self-identification has doubled over the past decade, especially spiking in younger generations.
Recent Gallup polling based on 2021 data found a whopping 21% of Gen Zers identify as LGBTQ, while 10.5% of millennials self-identify the same way, and further generations only continue to decrease with such identification: 4.2% of Gen Xers, 2.6% of baby boomers, and just 0.8% of traditionalists, The Washington Post reported.
The increase in such identification is almost exclusively due to cultural acceptance of LGBT folks, the mainstream narrative goes.
“They’ve really grown up in a culture where being LGBT was normal and not something that people had to be embarrassed about or try and hide,” Gallup senior editor Jeffrey Jones told the Post. “Certainly there’s still some discrimination, but it’s nothing like it’s been when the older generations were growing up … it’s both things happening — the behaviors and the attitudes are changing, and it’s also the population changing.”
However, others have suggested the increase is driven in large part by social norms, incentive structures, and social contagion.
Daily Wire founding editor-in-chief and editor emeritus Ben Shapiro, citing polling and the work of academics like Abigail Shrier, said people’s sexual behaviors and thoughts can be influenced by outside forces.
“Sexual behavior, sexual identification is malleable,” the Daily Wire cofounder said in March. “This does not mean that your orientation is not biologically encoded in some part, or large part, or even entirely in some cases … [but] there is no such thing as genetic encoding of behavior in you. It does not work that way.”
After citing statistics on the increase in so-called trans kids and LGBT self-identification, Shapiro asserted, “Does that sound like evolutionary biology just suddenly reversed itself … or does it sound like there’s a social contagion taking place with regard to identification as a sexual minority? It certainly seems like the latter,” he said. “There’s good polling data to suggest that this is generational.”
Related: ‘Did Madonna Just Come Out?’: Madonna’s Latest TikTok Post Blows Up Online
