Originally published by our partners at The 19th on January 26, 2026.
LGBTQ+ adults smoke cigarettes at higher rates, according to the American Cancer Society, and fewer people are taking notice.
One in 6 queer and 1 in 3 transgender U.S. adults smoke cigarettes. That’s compared with 1 in 9 straight cisgender adults. There are many reasons for this gulf: LGBTQ+ people seek stress relief to deal with discrimination, and the tobacco industry has aggressively marketed to LGBTQ+ people in the past.
But federal cuts mean fewer people and resources are available to address this disparity, and researchers are taking matters into their own hands.
The American Cancer Society recently debuted a comprehensive report on U.S. tobacco trends that includes state-by-state data. The report was always meant to be a resource, but now it feels like a stopgap for a looming lack of federal data, said Dr. Nigar Nargis, senior scientific director of tobacco control research at the American Cancer Society.
The Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)is effectively gone, since its employees were all dismissed last spring. That office was the leading agency for tobacco prevention and control; it ran national ad campaigns to help smokers quit and funded state programs. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products has significantly cut staff.
In this environment, researchers feel like they can’t rely on federal data anymore.
“We were not really prepared for filling this gap,” Nargis said.
Many LGBTQ+ people already know that smoking cigarettes is a frequent sight in the community. But they may not know why. Minal Patel, a senior principal scientist at the American Cancer Society, said the tobacco industry has poured a lot of money into making smoking “part of the culture” for LGBTQ+ people.
Back in the 1990s and 2000s, the tobacco industry backed legislation that supported the LGBTQ+ community, as well as HIV research, Patel said. They also sought out the community in more visible ways: Tobacco companies took out ads in emerging gay press magazines, and they still sponsor Pride events and gay bars. Now, more LGBTQ+ people are watching social media influencers tout vape products.
“Having a vulnerable population exposed to tobacco marketing when they don’t need to be and making it seem part of the culture is really predatory,” said Patel, who has been working in tobacco control, cancer and health disparities research for about 20 years.
Several LGBTQ+ people, all previously heavy smokers, told The 19th that there are other unseen connections between cigarettes and being queer, too.
For Emerson Wright, a law professor in Florida, smoking was how he first found LGBTQ+ friends as an adult. As a young queer kid in the South, he learned to associate smoking with safe places for people like him, like gay-friendly coffeeshops. And once he left college, smoking was the best way to catch a break at his pizza delivery or call center jobs.
For Anasofia Wessel, a trans woman in Oregon, smoking became a crutch to deal with stress. After she broke her foot in 2024, life kept hitting her hard: she lost her job and temporarily lost housing.Meanwhile, the stress of anti-trans politics weighed on her.
Everyone The 19th spoke with began smoking as teenagers: at 15, 16 or 17 years old. They all started, and kept going, because their friends were doing it. It offered a chance for connection, to strike up easy conversation with a stranger. Along the way, it became a way to cope with homophobia and transphobia or to ease stress. Some tried to quit and failed multiple times. But eventually, what became more important was preserving their health and the relationships that are most important to them.
“I would like to have a long, happy life with my partner. My grandpa died at 65. He got lung cancer metastasized to his spine. And that sucks. I don’t want to die at 65,” Wessel said. Her grandpa had smoked since he was 13. She was there when he died. And lately, thinking about the future with her girlfriend has helped her stay focused.
“In order to get myself to stop smoking, I started going for a run the next day, every time I smoked a cigarette,” she said. “It feels like knives being stabbed into your lungs.”
Finding the will to stop smoking also has unique connections to LGBTQ+ identity. Two trans people told The 19th that they were only able to quit after they began their gender transition. Once they could live openly as themselves, they cared about their health for what felt like the first time.
“Transitioning and getting a body that I wanted to take care of — that definitely changed my mindset about my physical health in a whole lot of ways,” Wright said.
Matt Irving quit cigarettes in 2024 after 30 years of smoking. Last year, he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. As a gay man, receiving cancer treatment from a provider who was familiar with LGBQ+ health care wasn’t a given. If he and his husband hadn’t moved to New Jersey shortly before his diagnosis, his treatment would have been very different, he said.
“There’s great resources for us around here,” he said. “In North Carolina … there was nobody who was understanding of PrEP or anything like that.”
Last fall, a bipartisan group of 22 attorneys general asked the CDC to continue the youth tobacco survey. That survey, which first shed light on widespread youth e-cigarette use, was pulled from the field early in 2025, according to the American Lung Association. Its future is now uncertain. Although the CDC has proposed revisions to the 2026-2028 survey, it has not gone into detail about those changes.
Some tobacco control researchers were also nervous about whether the CDC would continue the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which includes smoking data. The national survey is one of the few that was spared when the agency’s Population Health Office was cut last year. The CDC said in an emailed statement that data was collected as normal throughout 2025.
Once the American Cancer Society report published in November, requests came in for the nonprofit to fill federal gaps in tobacco research. That could change how the organization tracks this data. The report presents a wide-ranging snapshot on tobacco use, but it doesn’t delve into historical data. In the past, they relied on the CDC for that.
“Now we have to think about creating archives that offer this kind of information,” Nargis said.