The gayest state in America is…Kentucky!?

UPDATE: Over the weekend, it came out that The Williams Institute misreported the numbers on Kentucky. The real estimate is 4.9% of LGBTQ+ adults, rather than 10.5%.

Time to plan your next vacation to the hottest new gay destination: Kentucky?

Yes, you read that right. According to a new study from UCLA, Kentucky is officially America’s gayest state in terms of LGBT population.

That doesn’t mean Kentucky literally has the most gay people — the state isn’t that big to begin with. Rather, Kentucky has the highest proportion of LGBT people in its population, with a whopping 10.5% of adults in Kentucky self-identifying as LGBT. That means every 1 in 10 people walking down the streets of Louisville and Lexington is queer, a fact you’d never guess from the state’s reputation or its conservative voting habits.

Landlocked, southern Kentucky having such a disproportionately queer population likely comes as a shock. America’s gay meccas have always been on the coasts: New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, to name a few. But the results don’t lie — there must be something in the Kentucky water that the coastal elite haven’t caught onto.

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Technically, the highest proportion of LGBT adults goes not to Kentucky, but to the District of Columbia, with 14.3%. In terms of states, though, Kentucky reigns supreme, followed by Oregon and Delaware with 7.8% and 7.5% respectively.

Rounding out the rest of the top gayest states are Vermont (7.4%), New Hampshire (7.2%), Washington (6.9%), Colorado (6.8%), Nevada (6.6%), and Masschussetts, Maine, and Rhode Island, all tied with 6.5%.

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On the opposite end of the spectrum, the states with the lowest percentage of LGBT people are West Virginia and Mississippi, which both have a measly 4.1%. Other painfully straight states include North Carolina (4.4%), Illinois (4.5%), Alabama (4.6%), Iowa (4.7%), North Dakota (4.9%), and South Carolina (4.9%).

The study also analyzed its results by region, showing that the highest percentage of America’s queer population is in the South, with 36.9% of all LGBT adults living in southern states. Meanwhile, 24.2% live in the West, 20.6% live in the Midwest, and just 18.3% live in the Northeast.

Overall, the study found that 5.6% of American adults identify as LGBT. That’s 14.1 million people across the U.S. 

That proportion gets higher the younger the adult: between the ages of 18 and 24, 15.4% of Americans identify as LGBT, with that percentage trending downward with older populations. You heard it here first: the future belongs to the gays.