WASHINGTON — Increasingly visible, the number of gay Americans telling the U.S. Census they’re living with same-sex partners nearly doubled in the past decade to about 650,000, and more than 130,000 of them recorded themselves as husband or wife.
Census figures released Tuesday provide a rare snapshot of married and unmarried same-sex couples in the U.S. based on the government count conducted last year, when gay marriage was legal in five states and the District of Columbia. It comes at a time when public opposition to gay marriage is easing and advocacy groups are seeking a state-by-state push for broader legal rights.
Some 131,729 same-sex couples checked “husband” or “wife” boxes on their decennial census forms, the first time people could do so, after gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts starting in 2004.
That 2010 tally of married gay couples is higher than the number of legal marriages, civil unions and domestic partnerships in the U.S. Even after New York legalized gay marriage in June, a Census Bureau consultant, Gary Gates of the University of California at Los Angeles, put the number of legally recognized gay partnerships at 100,000.
The total of 646,464 gay couples in the U.S. was a downward revision of the Census Bureau’s count of 901,997 released last month. The bureau said Tuesday it had to make the adjustment after determining that coding errors resulted in an exaggerated count for the initial number.
Still, researchers believe the new estimate could be as much as 15 percent lower than the actual number of gay couples in the U.S. because of social stigma, discrimination or other concerns about confidentiality. Nationwide, about 51 percent of the couples last year were female. Nearly one in five of the same-sex couples were raising children at home.
Broken down by state and the nation’s capital, the highest share of households with reported same-sex couples was in Washington, D.C., at nearly 2 percent, followed by Vermont, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Delaware, New Mexico and Washington state. On the other end of the scale, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming had the smallest shares, each with less than one-third of 1 percent.
