Though statisticians struggle to get Britons to reveal their sexual preferences, Pornhub, the internet’s most popular adult site, has no such problems. The highest concentrations of gay organisations are in cities-London, Manchester, Brighton-whereas most of the countryside is poorly served.īut this may not say much about where gay people actually live. But broadly the pattern conforms to the urban stereotype. Some results were surprising: per person, Devon has among the most gay establishments in the country.
These included everything from charities and church groups to social clubs and saunas. How much do events like the Dartington Outing say about where the gay population lives?įor a sense of where queer life is most visible, we scraped listings websites for the details of gay and lesbian organisations. If counting gay people is tricky, mapping them is harder still. Among 18- to 24-year-olds less than half did. By contrast an online poll by YouGov, which asked people to plot their sexuality on a seven-point spectrum, found that only 72% considered themselves exclusively straight.
The official Annual Population Survey finds that 93.4% of interviewees define themselves as straight, with 4.1% offering no answer and 2.5% identifying as homosexual, bisexual or “other”. Surveys reach wildly different conclusions depending on their methodology. Measuring the spread of gay Britain is difficult. “Some local older people never thought Pride would be in Totnes in their lifetimes,” says Max Price, who co-runs Proud2Be, a support network in Devon. Pride parades trundle through towns from Colchester to Chesterfield. “God’s Own Country”, a recent film, depicts a romance between two young shepherds in Yorkshire. But queer life beyond the city is increasingly visible, on screen and in real life.
“The media perception of gay life is young, urban and hedonistic, which is what is received by the wider public,” says Justin Bengry, a historian of sexuality at Goldsmiths, University of London. Some Devonians may have been surprised to find such sexual colour in rural Britain. Yet at the end of September the estate hosted the first Dartington Outing, a week-long jamboree of “queer arts and bent events”, featuring lesbian life drawing, a virtual-reality tour of a gay HIV-positive man’s body, and a “rainbow tea party”. WITH its cream teas and rolling gardens, Dartington Hall in Devon resembles a picture postcard of the conventional, conservative English countryside.