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, the county that contains Brighton and Hove. 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. [...]
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.”
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