A single takeaway of my personal opinion from this series of polls is that Gen Z is comfortable with themselves, don’t feel the need to hide, and the older generations are following suit and/or the long fought battle for social change from the older generations have finally yielded an environment that people can just be themselves.

At least a small part is simply people having the knowledge to realize they are LGBT, but this is probably more relevant for the less common parts of the rainbow. Part of that is just the internet has grown. I found I gravitated towards queer spaces personally despite thinking I was allocishet at the time.

I can for sure say the general culture today, I would feel comfortable being out in, but in 2012… I would not have been.

This is still dependent on what type of LGBT you are and what area you are in imo. Personally, I don't think I'd have had any problem being out as gay in 2012 (pretty sure a fair number of people assumed I was and I thought that was cool), but I'm still plenty uncomfortable being out as trans atm, for example. Granted, part of it was I was in school in 2012 and now I work in the field of education (fortunately not a public school) in Texas.