Conclusion

Market research today is a valid and promising tool for understanding and mapping glbtq households and will become even more important and more useful in the years ahead. Experience tells us that the rapid progress in this area made in corporate America and in the marketplace show growing respect and acceptance for gay men and lesbians as customers, managers, entrepreneurs, shareholders, and employees.

Sponsor Message.

As public opinion trends underscore, American attitudes toward homosexuality and sexual minorities, particularly among younger people, are changing very quickly. This improving climate combined with enhanced knowledge will inform public debate among policymakers and help transform ignorance and invisibility into broader social acceptance for one of the world's remaining stigmatized and often misunderstood populations. It serves everyone's interest to foster and advance all forms of research about glbtq people.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, purveyors of products and services have worked to identify and court a glbtq market with both positive and negative effects.

Census 2000 revealed that there were 594,391 gay male and lesbian couples in the United States, living in 99.3 percent of all U.S. counties; nearly a quarter of these couples are raising children, and these families live in 96 percent of U.S. counties.

Recent surveys and data collection efforts hold the promise of providing a more accurate demographic picture of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community.

Not limited to activity in the traditionally conceived political sphere, identity politics refers to activism, politics, theorizing, and other similar activities based on the shared experiences of members of a specific social group, often relying on shared experiences of oppression.

Political scientists have generated insights important to the study of sexuality through research into glbtq participation in formal politics, studies of sexuality as a category of power, and reconceptualizations of the relationship between sexuality and politics.

As an academic field, sociology has only recently begun to examine sexuality, and members of the profession are divided over glbtq concerns.

"Transgender" has become an umbrella term representing a political alliance between all gender variant people who do not conform to social norms for typical men and women and who suffer political oppression as a result.

The most important sex researcher of the twentieth century, Alfred C. Kinsey contributed groundbreaking studies of male and female sexual behavior in America.