by Rex Wockner
International News Briefs
The United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics has produced data suggesting that only 1.5 percent of UK adults are gay, lesbian or bisexual.
As part of a yearly data collection effort, ONS questioned 247,623 people about their sexual identity. In the case of face-to-face interviews, respondents were shown a card that said "heterosexual/straight, gay/lesbian, bisexual, other" and told to read out a number beside the word that "best describes how you think of yourself." In telephone interviews, respondents were read the four categories and told to "please say 'yes' when you hear the option that best describes how you think of yourself."
ONS then applied the results to the UK population and reported that 1 percent of adults are gay or lesbian, of which two-thirds are men, 0.5 percent are bisexual, of which two-thirds are women, and 0.5 percent identify as "other." Just under 4 percent of actual respondents said they didn't know the answer to the question or refused to answer it or didn't respond in any way.
Of the "other" category, ONS says: "The 'Other' option on the sexual identity question was included to address the fact that not all people will fall in the first three categories and that some people such as those that are asexual, may feel no sense of sexual identity at all. In addition, individuals who disagree with the simplistic male/female gender binary, or who were against categorisation based on the gender of people to whom they were attracted or with whom they had relations, could also prefer to identify as other."
The data also show that compared to straight people, GLB people are better educated, have better jobs (except for bisexuals), are younger, are more likely to be smokers (33 percent) and are more likely to have no religion (34 percent).
London was found to have the highest percentage of gay residents, 2.2 percent, and Northern Ireland the lowest, 0.9 percent.
