"Gays count; count gays": LGBT+ activism and census politics in the United Kingdom

When the censuses of England and Wales and of Northern Ireland took place in March 2021, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to include a question about sexual orientation in a census. Existing accounts of the decision to add this question to the census trace it back to consultations run by the Office for National Statistics in the mid-2000s, which considered but ultimately rejected adding the question to the previous, 2011 census. Making use of archive materials, in this paper I demonstrate that LGBT+ activists were advocating the inclusion of a sexual orientation question significantly earlier than is currently appreciated. Arguments were already being made for the collection of official statistics on sexuality in the 1970s and these voices grew more prominent in discussions about the 1991 census. Drawing on both archives and interviews, the paper traces how the arguments made in favour of enumeration of sexual identities developed over this longer time period. I show how LGBT+ activism in relation to the census went from being primarily reactive to more proactive, linking this to the trend of professionalisation of the sector, but also highlight continuities in the types of argument deployed in favour of adding the question, such as comparisons with the perceived value of collecting data on ethnicity.