Sexual orientation in the UK by region, sex, age, legal partnership status, and ethnic group. These are official statistics in development.

Sexual identity estimates by occupation 2014. This is presented at a UK level, and broken down by England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

These datasets provide Census 2021 estimates that classify usual residents aged 16 years and over in England and Wales by sexual orientation by sex, sexual orientation by age and sexual orientation by sex and age.

LGB+

An abbreviation used to refer to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and other minority sexual orientations (for example, asexual).

_Sexual orientation _

Sexual orientation is an umbrella term covering sexual identity, attraction, and behaviour. For an individual respondent, these may not be the same. For example, someone in an opposite-sex relationship may also experience same-sex attraction, and vice versa. This means the statistics should be interpreted purely as showing how people responded to the question, rather than being about whom they are attracted to or their actual relationships.

We have not provided glossary entries for individual sexual orientation categories. This is because individual respondents may have differing perspectives on the exact meaning.

The question on sexual orientation was new for Census 2021. It was voluntary and was only asked of people aged 16 years and over.

In total, 44.9 million people answered the sexual orientation question (92.5% of the population aged 16 years and over).

Usual resident

A usual resident is anyone who on Census Day, 21 March 2021, was in the UK and had stayed or intended to stay in the UK for a period of 12 months or more or had a permanent UK address.

Notes

• To ensure that individuals cannot be identified in the data, population counts have been rounded to the nearest five and counts under 10 have been suppressed.

• Percentages have been calculated using rounded data.

Data collected between 2014 and 2016 from self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) individuals in India and the UK. This data was collected at specific workshops held in India and the UK, and via the project's website (see Related Resources).

The study used a 7 phase mixed methods design: 1. Project planning and research design, including formally establishing the advisory group and meeting 1, setting milestones and setting in place all agreements/ethical approvals 2. Literature review exploring key measures used to rate and assess LGBTQ 'friendliness'/inclusion nationally, supra-nationally and internationally 3. A spatial assessment of LGBTQ liveabilities that includes, but moves beyond, the measures identified in phase 2, applying these at a local scale e.g. policy indicators and place based cultural indicators 4. Twenty focus groups (80 participants, sample targeting marginalised LGBTQ people), coupled with online qualitative questionnaires (150), and shorter SMS text questionnaires (200)/App responses (200) to identify add to the liveability index created in phase 3 and what makes life un/liveable for a range of LGBTQ people and how this varies spatially 5. Participants in the data collection will be invited to reconfigure place through UK/India street theatre performances. These will be video recorded, edited into one short video and widely distributed. Data will be collected by observing interactions; on the spot audience surveys; reflections on the event 6. The research will analyse the data sets as they are collected. At the end of the data collection phase time will be taken to look across all 4 data sets to create a liveability index 7. Research dissemination will be targeted at community and academic audiences, including end of project conferences in India/UK, collating policy/community reports, academic outputs. The impact plan details the short (transnational support systems; empowerment of participants), medium (policy changes, inform practice) and long-term (changing perceptions of LGBTQ people) social impacts and how these will be achieved.

The main research objective is to move beyond exclusion/inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) communities in UK and India creating a liveability model that can be adapted globally. Whilst work has been done to explore the implications of Equalities legislation, including contesting the normalisations of neo-liberalisms, there has yet to be an investigation into what might make every day spaces liveable for LGBTQ people. This project addresses social exclusion, not only through identifying exclusions, but also by exploring how life might become liveable in everyday places in two very different contexts. In 2013 the Marriage (Same Sex) Act passed in the UK, and in India the Delhi High Court's reading down Indian Penal Code 377 in 2009 to decriminalize sexual acts between consenting same-sex people was overturned by the Supreme Court. Yet bullying, mental health and safety continue to be crucial to understanding British LGBTQ lives, in contrast the overturned the revoke of Penal Code 377 2013, this has resulted in increased visibilities of LGBTQ people. These different contexts are used to explore liveable lives as more than lives that are just 'bearable' and moves beyond norms of happiness and wellbeing. This research refuses to be fixed to understanding social liberations through the exclusion/inclusion, in place/out of place dichotomies. Using commonplace to move beyond 'in place' towards being common to the place itself. Place can then be shared in common as well as collectively made in ways that do not necessarily impose normative agendas/regulatory conditionalities. Social liberations are examined in the transformation of everyday encounters without conforming to hegemonies or making 'normal' our own. Whilst the focus is sexual and gender liberations, the project will enable considerations of others social differences. It will show how places produce differential liveabilities both where legislative change has been achieved and where it has just been repealed. Thus, the project offers academic and policy insights into safety, difference and vibrant and fair societies.

This project was undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of researchers with backgrounds in public health and media and cultural studies and by working closely with the project's partners - Terrence Higgins Trust, London Friend and Waverley Care - all key third sector organisations working with gay and bisexual men. Drawing on these various expertise, we undertook in-depth qualitative interviews 43 queer men from two different locations in the UK - London and Edinburgh. The project explored how queer men in the UK used smartphones and digital technologies to mediate intimacy.

This project data set includes 43 semi-structured qualitative interviews with gay and bisexual - or queer men - including cis (33) and trans (10) men based in London and Edinburgh. Interviews were undertaken online between July 2020 and January 2021, during the first year of the COVID pandemic in a period before vaccines were available.

Topics covered include sexualities, relationships, intimacy, racism, transphobia, disability, vulnerability, COVID-19 mitigations, hook-up or dating apps, media and culture.

Since smartphones became widely available in 2007 both media, communications & cultural studies and public health academics have been researching how gay and bisexual men use them to negotiate their cultures of intimacy. This research has tended to focus on how these men use 'hook-up' applications, such as Grindr and Scruff, to organise casual sex encounters, particularly in relation to safer sex negotiation. In doing so, much of this research has enriched our understanding of gay and bisexual men's casual sex practices; informed HIV prevention strategies; and begun to shed light on the role of digital media in both of these related contexts.

However, by focusing on hook-up apps, this research has so far overlooked some important issues that relate to smartphone use and intimacy amongst these men. Gay and bisexual men do not only use hook-up apps to negotiate their intimate lives, which are not exclusively defined by casual sex; they frequently migrate between different aspects of their smartphones (e.g. the phone itself, the camera, other social media applications) to practice different sorts of intimacy (e.g. monogamous relationships, open relationships, one off sexual encounters, on-going casual sex partners, infidelities). Researching these practices will have implications not only for popular understandings of gay and bisexual male intimacy (which are often over-determined by casual sex), but also for how effectively the public health sector can provide services that improve the overall health and wellbeing of these men beyond HIV prevention.

The existing research also has a tendency to decontextualize this smartphone use, not fully accounting for the wider socio-cultural conditions in which this use takes place. Gay and bisexual men use smartphones to negotiate intimacy in socio-cultural contexts in which not only ideas and attitudes towards gay and bisexual men are changing (e.g. the legalization of gay marriage, liberalization of more general attitudes to gay and bisexual men) but the material conditions in which they practice intimacy are changing too (e.g. changes in gay nightlife; changes in HIV prevention and treatment; and constantly updating smartphone and internet technologies). This project begins from the cultural studies perspective that media use cannot be adequately made sense of outside of the cultures in which this use takes place. It therefore aims to understand the various ways that gay and bisexual men use different aspects of their smartphones to negotiate different sorts of intimacies within these constantly shifting socio-cultural conditions.