Lesbians tend to be happier than their heterosexual counterparts

That is one of the results of the paper

Sexual identity and wellbeing: A distributional analysis

At this point, the astute reader of this blog is sine dubio interested to learn who is least happy? Glad you asked, it is the bisexuals, they "are the least satisfied with life of all sexual groups". And on this bombshell here is the lowdown of the paper:

In spite of this extensive body of research, much less is known about the impact that being a sexual minority has upon wellbeing...The data are of individuals taken from waves 1-5 of Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study. A nationally representative panel started in 2009, it interviews approximately 50,000 UK individuals annually....Sexual identity is significantly correlated with wellbeing, with the relative position of non-heterosexuals improving as we move along the wellbeing distribution...Our findings also shed new light on the importance of gender, showing that it plays a significant role only for homosexuals...For homosexual males, results indicate that they are less satisfied than heterosexuals in the lower half of the wellbeing distribution, with the largest differential being at the 10th percentile (-0.488).

To put this into context, being a homosexual rather than heterosexual is estimated to be greater or equal to the effect of having ill-health across the entire distribution. For females, homosexuals have greater wellbeing than their heterosexual counterparts across all but the lowest decile, peaking at the 90th percentile (0.273)...

Some of the happiest individuals with an "other" sexual identity are in fact happier than the happiest heterosexuals, and for all but the least happy, lesbians report significantly higher wellbeing than comparable heterosexuals... This stands in contrast to the existing (mean-based) evidence that points to sexual minorities being less satisfied than their heterosexual counterparts...

Meanwhile, bisexuals of any gender are the least satisfied of any sexual group, and this is apparent across the entire wellbeing distribution.

H/T Rolf Degen on Twitter