The UK’s gay population has been mapped by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for the first time, revealing concentrations of lesbian, gay and bisexual people from central London to rural Devon.
The ONS – the government’s statistics body – has mapped how many people told researchers they were gay, lesbian or bisexual, broken down by county and by local authority, for an experimental dataset covering 2013 to 2015.
Some of the findings are unsurprising: six of the 10 local authorities with the highest relative lesbian, gay and bisexual populations are in inner London, including Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark, while Brighton and Manchester also make the list.
But the county-by-county data puts rural Devon slightly ahead of East Sussex (excluding the unitary authority of Brighton and Hove, which is counted separately from the rest of the county). An estimated 1.3% of Devon’s population told researchers they were gay, lesbian or bisexual, slightly ahead of the 1.1% estimated for East Sussex.
The ONS’s estimates come with significant caveats: for Devon, the result could be between 0.7% and 1.9%, while for East Sussex it could be between 0.5% and 1.5%. The organisation stresses that the data is experimental and not official government statistics.
Mat Price, co-founder of Proud2Be, which organises the Totnes Pride festival and other events, moved to the Devon town with his brother Jon from Brighton five years ago. “There wasn’t anything visible. There was a gay men’s group, so there had always been little groups, but there wasn’t a Pride event, so part of our mission was to increase visibility,” he said.
He added: “It might be that people are starting to feel like they can live in rural locations and not just in London, Brighton and Manchester, and maybe part of it is about feeling more confident to report it.”
Devon is largely welcoming for gay people, he said, but this is not universal. “In Totnes, we’ve had overwhelming support, but when the support becomes visible, you get the other side: when we do something that’s visible, like a procession, that tends to highlight some of the prejudice that still exists.”
He added: “There’s still discrimination, there’s still hate crime.”
In other parts of the country, very few people are telling researchers they are gay, lesbian or bisexual. In North Yorkshire, an estimated 0.4% of people identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, with a lower-end range as low as one in 1,000 people describing themselves to researchers as such. For other counties, such as Buckinghamshire and Suffolk, there was too little data available to produce robust estimates, the ONS said.
The ONS created the dataset by combining data on 560,000 individuals from three years of the Annual Population Survey, which gathers data through confidential phone or in-person interviews.
This allowed the organisation to break down the results to a more local level than previous reports, which focused on regions.
April Guasp, head of research at LGBT campaign group Stonewall, said: “It’s encouraging to see research efforts to gain a better understanding of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans population and identify the diverse needs of different LGBT communities in Britain.
“We welcome continued research as LGBT people continue to grow more comfortable in disclosing this information over time.”
By a slender margin, Northern Ireland was the country of the UK found to have the highest proportion of gay men – an estimated 1.6%, compared with 1.5% for England, 1.3% for Wales and 1.1% for Scotland. But it was also the country where women were least likely to say they were lesbian - just 0.3%.
However, some questioned the impact of how the data was collected. “I’m encouraged to see there’s been an increase in people in Northern Ireland identifying as LGB, but this disparity I find really challenging,” said Gavin Boyd, policy manager at the Rainbow Project, a Belfast-based support organisation.
One factor could be a reluctance by women to identify themselves as lesbian, he said. “You’ll find in a lot of places that have experienced armed conflict, the role of women tends to be minimised: post-conflict places tend to be quite macho societies.”
It is possible, he said, that women do not feel able to say they are lesbian in a place where declaring as such “could still be considered a political act”. “Lots of out people would have difficulty identifying themselves as gay to someone from the government who’s knocking on the door … it’s always going to be a particular challenge for some people to answer that question honestly.”
But although the laws in Stormont lag some way behind the rest of the UK – it was the last country to decriminalise gay sex, and gay marriage remains illegal – attitudes in Northern Ireland have progressed rapidly, Boyd said. “Things have changed dramatically over the course of the last 10-15 years. We would never have considered the rate of change possible.”
The discrepancy between gay men and lesbians in the data does not reflect his experiences. “If I look at our clients, it’s pretty much a 50-50 split, and if I look at Pride there’s no way there are six times more men than women,” he said.
The full ONS data has calculations for different local authorities, counties and nations of the UK.