Two women share a kiss in Montgomery, Ala. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
The 2010s, baby. More Americans are opening up to the idea of same-sex experiences—and trying them out, according to a survey of 30,000 adults that's been ongoing since 1972.
A year after the survey began, just 11 percent of participants thought homosexual sex was A-OK. By 1990, that figure had barely risen to 13 percent. As of 2014, however, 49 percent said "sexual relations between two adults of the same sex" was "not wrong at all," researchers explain in Archives of Sexual Behavior, per NBC News.
Young Americans aged 18 and 19 were much more accepting, with 63 percent agreeing with the above statement. Though there was "little consistent change in those having sex exclusively with same-sex partners," the change in sentiment is apparently encouraging more Americans to change it up between the sheets, researchers say.
Those who reported having at least one same-sex partner as an adult doubled between the early 1990s and early 2010s from 3.6 to 8.7 percent for women and 4.5 to 8.2 percent for men.
The jump was even larger among whites and those in the South and Midwest. The number of Americans engaging in bisexual behavior rose from 3.1 to 7.7 percent.
"These large shifts in both attitudes and behavior occurred over just 25 years, suggesting rapid cultural change," a study author says, per the Huffington Post.
"Americans now feel more free to have sexual experiences they desire." One interesting tidbit: Women—particularly millennials—were most likely to have a same-sex experience at a young age, "suggesting there is some truth to the idea that some women are 'lesbian until graduation,'" a researcher says.
No such trend was seen among men. (This study found almost a third of young Americans are bisexual.)
This article originally appeared on Newser: More of Us Are Knocking Boots With the Same Sex
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