Report: Gay People Show Little Interest in Marriage After All

A new report asserts that, despite the international push for same-sex marriage in the name of civil rights, few gays and lesbians are taking advantage of legal wedded bliss, and many of those who are, end up filing for divorce.

According to a report in the Economist, the number of gay marriages has been far smaller than ever predicted.

Despite more and more countries legalising gay marriage, the number of gay weddings are not as high as expected https://t.co/wDqR0Hl0sX

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) November 28, 2017

In the United States, only one in ten gays and lesbians have entered into a same-sex marriage, and in the U.K., less than 6,000 such weddings took place when at least 9,000 were expected.

“Opponents of gay marriage sometimes fret that it will spoil straight people’s appetite for the traditional kind, but no evidence for this has emerged,” the report states.

“It hasn’t taken off as I would have hoped,” said Emma Joanne of Shotgun Weddings, a photography firm based in gay-friendly Brighton in Britain.

While lesbian marriages are more likely to occur than those between men, they are also more likely to head for divorce, notes the report.

In 2016, the New York Times reported that, by linking the 2014 tax returns of same-sex couples with Social Security records, researchers were able to observe that, in that year, “there were 183,280 same-sex marriages in America, roughly a third of one percent of all marriages.”

The report notes the top 20 cities for male same-sex marriages are dense urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, while lesbian marriages tend to be concentrated in small- to medium-sized cities such as Springfield, Massachusetts; Madison, Wisconsin; and Burlington, Vermont.

San Francisco has the highest rate of same-sex male marriage at 3.20 percent, while Oakland, California, comes in for the highest rate of lesbian marriages at 2.1 percent.

The Times further explains that one of the main difficulties in obtaining statistics on gays and lesbians is that “they represent such a small fraction of the total population.”