Momentum: Tracking Progress on U.S. LGBT Equality

The opening decade of the 21st century was a tremendous and tumultuous time for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in America. Even as gay rights became a volatile central battleground in the culture war, LGBT people and allies made dramatic gains in the fight for marriage and against discrimination. The movement built during these years would go on to gain the support of a majority of Americans and win major victories for marriage equality in the Supreme Court.

The “Decade of Progress” is charted in the 2009 Momentum Report, with support from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, and executed by the LGBT Movement Advancement Project (MAP), a think-tank founded in 2006 to produce researched aimed at forwarding LGBT equality. Two-thirds of the 36 statistical indicators compiled in the report showed significant advances in LGBT rights, including sharp increases in the number of LGBT Americans protected by nondiscrimination and family recognition legislation at the state level. Just over a quarter of the indicators were negative, and two showed mixed results.

“The remarkable achievements toward LGBT equality tend to be obscured by day-to-day struggles, and overall progress often goes unnoticed nationally,” said Linda Bush, former executive director of MAP.

Click below to read the 2009 report, or visit http://www.lgbtmap.org/policy-and-issue-analysis/momentum-report to read about the 2007, 2011 or 2014 findings.

To read results from this and other Momentum reports, click here: http://www.lgbtmap.org/policy-and-issue-analysis/momentum-report