Generation Z Is Gayer, More Anxious and Less Conservative Than Other Generations

How Much of Generation Z Identifies as LGBTQ+?

A new survey from the PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) is making the rounds for its conclusion that Generation Z is gayer than other generations — a conclusion also reached by nearly every study on this topic over the past several years. This rise in affiliation is probably due to the superiority of the queer lifestyle and the rise of JoJo Siwa as well as more objective factors like more LGBTQ+ media visibility, more acceptance of gay people, less fear about identifying as LGBTQ+ and more knowledge that LGBTQ+ identities exist.

According to PRRI, who surveyed 6,014 human beings in total, 28% of Gen Z adults (ages 18-24) identify as LGBTQ+. Meanwhile, 16% of millennials, seven percent of Generation X and 4% of baby boomers identify as LGBTQ+. PRRI also surveyed Gen Z teens (ages 13 – 17) but did not ask them about their LGBTQ+ affiliation.

Other recent polls have delivered similar numbers. In June 2023, Ipsos found 16% of Generation Z and 15% of millennials in the United States identifying as LGBTQ+. In February 2023, Gallup determined that 19.7% of Gen Z and 11% of millennials identified as LGBTQ+. The difference in results between those surveys and the PRRI survey is almost definitely due to differences in the poll structures, samples and methodologies, rather than a year-to-year explosion of sexual deviance amongst Zoomers.

“Generation Z is More Likely To Be Gay Than Republican”

As many gay headlines have declared, the PRRI data also found Generation Z is more likely to identify as LGBTQ than they are as Republicans (21%). Last year, a 2023 Human Rights Campaign report (which cited 27% of Gen-Zers as LGBTQ+) made a similar declaration, warning the GOP that their party will continue declining in popularity as being LGBTQ becomes increasingly popular, and therefore maybe they should chill out with all of their anti-trans legislation!

36% of Gen Z adults are Democrats (similar to other generations), and 43% don’t align with either party. 43% consider themselves liberal, and aside from millennials (24%), Gen Z adults are significantly less likely than other generational cohorts to call themselves conservatives.

But the PRRI survey also showed Generation Z was skeptical of partisan politics and the electoral system in general and that most participants “expressed little faith in the federal government or elected officials in Washington” and felt that “elected officials put the needs of the wealthy or corporations ahead of average Americans.” Zoomers expressed skepticism towards mainstream news media and their ability to find any unbiased sources of information, while also sharing some small hopes about the possibilities of local politicians enacting community change. It’s almost like it would be more important than ever for news outlets to have writers who are recognizable human beings and not AI!

Gen Z adults and Millennials also were less likely than older adults to agree that voting is the most effective way to create change in America and more skeptical of the police, federal government, criminal justice system and the news. Still, somehow, over half of Gen Z adults reported some or a great deal of trust in the police (53%), which was more than expressed trust in any other public institution —  police outpaced news organizations (37%), the federal government (41%) and the criminal justice system (42%).

The demographics least likely to report some or a great deal of trust in the police were non-white Gen Z adults (47%) and Gen Z Democrats (45%). Gen Z Democrats were the only sub-demographic of Generation Z adults who trusted the news and the federal government more than the police, and the only group for which the criminal justice system overall was the least trusted entity. Gen Z Republicans, perhaps because their current devoted leader calls the news “fake” and loves the police, had the lowest levels of faith in the news organizations, and the highest levels of trust in the police.

Generation Z Adults were also the least likely to identify as white Christians (27%) and more likely to be religiously unaffiliated (33%) than every generation aside from millennials, who came in at 36%. I went ahead and dug up PRRI’s 2012 study of millennials — and at that time, only 25% of Millennials identified as religiously unaffiliated, suggesting that these rates may be increasing over time for younger generations, and I’m curious to see how high those numbers will climb in the coming years. I’m sure the Public Religion Research Institute is too!

The people most likely to agree that “college is a smart investment” are the people who went to college for $500 and the people who’ve yet to attend college because they are too young: 56% percent of Gen Z Teens and 57% of Silent Generation members said college is a smart investment, compared to 42% of millennials and around half of every other generational cohort.

Generation Z Adults Are More Likely To Be Anxious, Lonely and Online

Teenagers these days are faring better emotionally than Gen Z adults, who did, we should recall, enter a major stage of adulthood amid the height of a global pandemic. Gen Z adults are consistently more likely than Gen Z teens to report experiencing negative emotions often or almost all the time. For example, they’re more likely to feel anxious (38% vs. 18%) or depressed (24% vs. 8%).

Gen Z Democrats, women and teenage girls were also more likely to be anxious, lonely, depressed and angry than Gen Z Republicans, men, and teen boys. There was also a correlation between being Very Online and experiencing negative emotions — Zoomers who made meaningful connections through in-person activities like sports fared better than those who made their more meaningful connections through social media sites. Correlation and causation is difficult to parse out there — people who feel connected to their local communities and group activities may be happier than those who don’t, and those who don’t are more likely to need to find their community on the internet.

In general, it seemed that negative emotions peak with Gen Z adults and Millennials, with feelings of loneliness, depression and anxiety gradually decreasing across generational lines. It is clear that the best way to be happy is to be retired.

Generation Z Is Skeptical But Engaged

Ultimately, these numbers all tell the same story: Young people in this country — Generation Z and Millennials — are skeptical of it. They’re opting out of the hetero-patriarchy and organized religion. They’ve lost trust in the government, the media, and the criminal justice system. But this research points out that they’re also far more likely than other generations to have participated in some form of activism or direct action in the last 12 months, including volunteering and attending a rally or demonstration — with women more likely to have done so than men.

With surveys like this it’s always hard to draw conclusions by comparing generations, never really entirely sure how much of these results can be attributed to an age group and how much is truly specific to a generation. Historically, college-age humans have always been exceptionally politically engaged compared to younger people (with less independence and knowledge of current events) and older people (who often turn inwards toward familial and work obligations as they get older). In their 2015 survey of Millennials, 15% reported having attended a rally or demonstration in the past 12 months, in line with 14% of Gen Z Adults on this survey. Meanwhile, whereas Gen Z adults are more likely to be out there on the streets, Boomers and Silent Generation members are more likely to have contacted an elected official to express their views.

We’re All Getting Gayer

Although the focus of this survey was on Generation Z, it’s worth noting that numbers are increasing across the board across generations, indicating people coming into their sexual orientations and gender identities later in life. In PRRI’s  2015 survey, 7% of millennials identified as LGBT, and now 16% do. That’s big growth, so good job everybody!

feature image by Dmytro Betsenko via Getty Images.

Data nerds can read PRRI’s 80-page survey report here!

LGBTQ+ Population Growth Has Stalled Despite Our Best Efforts

Gallup’s most recent report on the number of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual” human beings in the U.S. has been released and it turns out that although it certainly feels like everybody ought to be gay by now, that is not in fact true: just like last year, only 7.2% of the population said they were LGBT.

This comes after notable increases in 2020 and 2021, which were prime years for re-evaluating your life, your choices, your gender and your sexuality. Furthermore, the younger you are, the more likely you are to identify as LGBTQ+.

U.S. adults’ identification as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual held steady in 2022, at 7.2%. The current percentage is double what it was when Gallup first measured LGBT identification a decade ago. pic.twitter.com/R9KZJqoP9z

— Gallup (@Gallup) February 22, 2023

Over 10,000 U.S. adults were asked, via Gallup telephone survey, if they identify as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual.” They were allowed to pick multiple identities. This resulted in a sample size of merely 584 LGBT adults, containing a minimum quota of 75% cellphone respondents and 25% landline respondents. However, nobody called me.

Although I understand that asking about all of these identities at once gives a snapshot of the entire community, enables them to compare their results to prior data, and maintains the spirit of the acronym, there certainly are benefits to not lumping gender identity and sexual orientation into the same question. See — Gallup also revealed that 86% of U.S. adults said they were straight or heterosexual, and 7% chose not to answer the question, adding up to a total of 100%. This means that either Gallup somehow didn’t talk to any heterosexual or “I don’t want to answer the question” trans people, or that Gallup didn’t offer trans people the option to identify as heterosexual, which is kinda problematic!

The Future is Gay

Unsurprisingly, the youths were much more likely to be LGBT+ than their parents, which suggests that over time our numbers could increase to the point where 20% of the overall population is LGBTQ+! Wouldn’t that be fun, I wonder if our television shows would still get cancelled.

Adult members of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2004) were most likely of all age-based subgroups to identify as LGBT. I actually wonder if these numbers could be higher in actuality, because I don’t know that Generation Z is big into picking up the phone when its an unknown number. 11.2% of millennials and 3.3% or less of older generations copped to being a member of world’s coolest community (LGBTQ+).

The number of Gen Zers who identify as LGBTQ increased significantly from 10.5% in 2017 to 20.8% in 2021, at which point Gallup senior editor Jeffery Jones noted, “They’ve really grown up in a culture where being LGBT was normal and not something that people had to be embarrassed about or try and hide. Certainly there’s still some discrimination, but it’s nothing like it’s been when the older generations were growing up … it’s both things happening — the behaviors and the attitudes are changing, and it’s also the population changing.”

Most LGBTQ+ Adults Are Bisexual

Of all the letters, B remains the most popular — more than half of respondents who said they were LGBTQ+ said they were bisexual. It’s also, unlike “lesbian” and “gay,” the only specific sexual orientation option on the survey without any gendered connotations, so its popularity is unsurprising. That said, even if you add all the gays and lesbians together, bisexuality still outpaces both.

via gallup

I’m assuming Gallup attempted to reach gender parity with this survey, but would love to know for sure! Also, are there more gay men than lesbian women in the world? Or did a lot of women and non-binary people pick “gay” as their sexual orientation?

Bisexuality was also the most popular identity amongst LGBTQ Generation Z’ers, Millenials and Generation Xers. But once we get to the Baby Boomers, those numbers shift: 26% of LGBTQ respondents are lesbians, 37% are gay, and only 26% are bisexual. This is even more stark in ‘The Silent Generation” — 12% are lesbians, 47% are gay and 35% are bisexual.

via gallup

Surprisingly, the Silent Generation had the highest proportion of “other LGBT”, with 12% of LGBTQ+ Adults choosing that option, compared to a low of 2% of millennials opting out of the offered labels. (Despite the popular conception that “queer’ is incredibly popular amongst Millenials and Gen Z!) I am dying to know if there are a lot of septuagenarians identifying as pansexual or if that group was just more likely to eschew labels altogether.

In conclusion, I would like to remind everybody of my favorite Gallup poll of all time, which was in 2011, and revealed that most Americans think 25% of the overall population is gay. I wonder what those numbers would be now, but in general it is a helpful reminder that there are no small parts, only small actors.

Some Millennial Women Giving Up On Men, Dating Women Exclusively Because We Are Supreme Beings

We’ve long suspected that an increasing acceptance of same-sex relationships and LGBQ identities would eventually lead to radical numbers of non-monosexual women choosing to date women and non-binary people exclusively. Women have reportedly held men in low esteem for some time, as reported by various sitcoms and branded products. Women are culturally conditioned to settle for inadequate sex, low levels of mutual interests, conflicting priorities and minimal emotional connection. It stands to reason, then, that as dating other women becomes an increasingly viable option, more and more women would take the leap into Sapphic seas. Like most things I talk about to mildly interested parties for 15+ years, every rotation of this blessed earth around the sun delivers more and more evidence that we are totally right.

Today on i-D, I opened a piece entitled “these women are making a commitment to being single” because I’ve recently noticed a trend amongst queer women to elect singledom over couplehood and wondered what this piece would say about it, only to find this within it:

For some women, not dating men means dating women exclusively. Monica, 30, who identifies as bisexual, says, “I have had my share of awkward or not entirely fulfilling romantic interactions with women, but I have never felt the kind of emotional and psychological drain (from women) that I have from the men I have dated or been romantic with. I am also a survivor of sexual assault and rape, both by men that I should have been able to trust. I am still attracted to (men), but I do not feel safe with them.”

Sigal, 26, is currently grappling with the question of whether or not to entirely stop dating men. She says, “I don’t think I have a natural preference between men and women. I can be very attracted to both. However, as I’ve grown to love and respect myself more, it’s so hard to justify going a date where I must feel fear and anxiety, where I must walk on eggshells should I decide not to pursue further engagement, and where I must be an unpaid teacher and therapist, when instead I could go on a date where I feel comfortable, understood, and appreciated as a full human person… Dating can be difficult and stressful no matter what gender you’re dating, so why add yet another layer of anxiety by dating men?”

Ah yes! Some women weren’t giving up on relationships altogether, just men!

This called to mind a recent excellent tweet from bisexual author Roxane Gay, in response to an article on CNBC about heterosexuals struggling in relationships where women out-earned men…

https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1001275594372362240

…and another excellent tweet from noted bisexual celebrity Gaby Dunn, delivered during the peak of the #MeToo conversation:

https://twitter.com/gabydunn/status/953105305625243648

It also reminded me of a kinda-weird 2010 Psychology Today article that posited the theory that young women were more likely to date other women these days because of unrealistic expectations that young men were developing from increased access to pornography:

A young woman told me how her boyfriend several years ago suggested that she shave her pubic hair, so that she might more closely resemble the porn stars who were this young man’s most consistent source of sexual arousal. She now identifies herself as bisexual. “It was just such a welcome change, to snuggle under a blanket on the couch with my girlfriend, watch a movie, and talk about God and death and growing old, to be intimate emotionally and spiritually as well as physically. I don’t know a guy who could even comprehend the conversations we have.”

The idea that women, who are more likely to experience sexual fluidity than men, should solve their problems with cis men by leaving them isn’t a new one, but it’s been increasingly argued in the wake of #MeToo. This February, The Stranger suggested, somewhat tongue-in-cheek but also somewhat seriously, “Disgusted by Men? Date Women Instead.” In March, MarketWatch talked to a Cal State Fullerton professor who said her recent informal research of OkCupid and Tinder showed “a lot of self-identified “straight” women… looking for other women for hookups and bisexual-identified women who say they are dating men more infrequently these days.” In Buzzfeed, Anne Helen Petersen concluded definitively, “we trust men at our own peril.” Online daters often express feeling more comfortable meeting up with women they don’t know than men, which was true of me many moons ago as well.

This all being said, it must also be said that same-sex relationships can come with their own sets of challenges and disarming power dynamics. We’re still vulnerable to intimate partner violence even in relationships that aren’t with cis men. We experience high levels of emotional abuse, and there are sometimes macro factors contributing to how that specific situation plays out — including but certainly not limited to less access to mental health care, higher rates of substance abuse, intergenerational trauma and alienation/exclusion from familial and social networks. I’ve personally experienced more emotional and physical abuse in relationships with women than with cis men (I dated men for ten years before becoming a lesbian) and anecdotally have heard more similar stories from my lady-loving friends then straight ones, but often those experiences occurred as a result of inadequately treated mental health issues. (This is not always or even usually the case, obviously, and that doesn’t make it okay. But that’s another post.) Conversely, I found, as many of the women in these articles do, the everyday indignities of dating perfectly “sane” men with heaps of privilege and healthy support networks to be profoundly soul-crushing, and I did not feel that way during the healthy relationships I’ve had with women.

But not every woman can date women, as per science and also one particular tide of second-wave lesbian feminism.

The Political Lesbianism movement is best remembered by activist Ti-Grace Atkinson’s declaration, “‘Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice.” In order to live a feminist life, they argued, women needed to eschew men and heteronormative institutions altogether, regardless of sexual attraction. This movement had its moment but eventually fell out of favor — ultimately, for most women, sexual orientation isn’t fluid or a choice, and it was no easier for an innately heterosexual woman to date women than it would be for a lesbian to devote herself entirely to sexual relationships with men. Nor is it fun for a woman to date anybody who isn’t attracted to her.

Furthermore, a lot of bisexual and queer women have found perfectly reasonable, smart, caring men to date and marry (even I have a few good exes), and lots of men aren’t terrible (e.g., you fave male relative, Barack Obama) or cis!

However, as passionate endorsers of the lady-loving lifestyle, it’s hard not to back this conversational trend.

Another trend I’m compelled by is the one that was the actual topic of the i-D piece: the possibility of women prioritizing friendships and communities over relationships, regardless of sexual orientation. Both i-D and a 2017 piece on Flare.com reflect a growing trend towards “de-prioritizing love, relegating men to utilitarian side dish and investing in our friends instead.”

See you on the commune, future homos! (Just kidding!) (Sort of)

Trump Administration Axes LGBTQ Count From Census, Clearly Fears Learning That Everyone Is Gay

It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it? That one, brief shimmering moment in time when the government was mildly interested in finding out how many LGBTQ people live in this burning hellfire of a country. When we counted, literally.

That moment is over.

via The Task Force

From The National LGBTQ Task Force:

In this morning’s version of the Administration’s report, while it conspicuously excluded lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBTQ) people on the list of “planned subjects” for the nation’s decennial census and longer form survey, “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” were included as “proposed” subjects in the appendix—indicating that data collection on these categories may have been in the works in an earlier version.

Including sexual orientation and gender identity on the 2020 Decennial Census Program would have been a major game-changer, providing an official count through both a “short-form only” census and the American Community Survey, which collects more detailed long-form data on a monthly basis. This has an enormous impact on the well-being of our community, as indicated in this statement from Meghan Maury, the Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director of the National LGBTQ Task Force:

Today, the Trump Administration has taken yet another step to deny LGBTQ people freedom, justice, and equity, by choosing to exclude us from the 2020 Census and American Community Survey. LGBTQ people are not counted on the Census—no data is collected on sexual orientation or gender identity. Information from these surveys helps the government to enforce federal laws like the Violence Against Women Act and the Fair Housing Act and to determine how to allocate resources like housing supports and food stamps. If the government doesn’t know how many LGBTQ people live in a community, how can it do its job to ensure we’re getting fair and adequate access to the rights, protections and services we need? We call on President Trump and his Administration to begin collecting sexual orientation and gender identity data on the American Community Survey as soon as possible and urge Congress to conduct oversight hearings to reveal why the Administration made the last-minute decision not to collect data on LGBTQ people.”

Way back in 2016, United States Chief Statistician Katherine Wallman told Time Magazine she was “leading the federal government’s working group on how to best gather data about sexual orientation and gender identity.” In April 2016, a bipartisan group had called on the government to include sexual orientation and gender identity in the Census, but at that time there were no plans to do so.

Up to this point, the best numbers we’ve gotten on LGBTQ community size have been through the Census’s cumbersome method of approximating numbers of same-sex couples through answers to questions about gender and relationships to other household members, and subsequent careful analysis of that data by The Williams Institute. (Basically everything we know about LGBTQ population size comes from The Williams Institute.)

The Census has been working to more accurately count same-sex couples, and as of 2014 was “testing new marriage and relationship questions on its surveys in hopes of producing more accurate numbers in the next few years.” This was to combat the apparently widespread problem of people checking the wrong gender box when answering questions about household members and other collection issues. Here’s one revision they were playing with:

The bureau was hoping to implement its revised relationship question on the 2020 Census, which could still happen — but that will ultimately require approval from the Office of Management and Budget. The current head of the OMB is Mick Mulvaney, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, who is generally full of shit. He co-sponsored South Carolina legislation to define marriage as being between one man and one woman as well as the First Amendment Defense Act, which would undermine anti-discrimination protections for same-sex married couples. The Census Bureau, like many other Bureaus these days, isn’t sure how much funding they’ll be getting from Congress in the ensuing years to do things like trial test its methods or execute follow-up visits to non-responsive people. There are already concerns about the accuracy of the 2020 counts in light of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

Data collected by social scientists reveal widely disparate potential answers to the “how many gay people exist” question, a saga of confusion and sadness we’ve been following closely for the last nine years. (Not having these numbers is especially vexing to journalists!) One recent survey of young people has revealed that a majority of 13-to-20 year olds do not identify as exclusively heterosexual, which is bananas and supports our sneaking suspicion that there are tons of gay people out there and therefore everybody should care more about us. Furthermore, data on same-sex couples clearly does absolutely nothing to help us get better data on how many transgender people exist. This would be really great to know because the transgender community faces astronomical rates of poverty, victimization, abuse, homelessness, suicidality and depression, and therefore is in especially desperate need of services and programs that often rely on federal government funding. From Time Magazine:

…the true scope of [outsized hardships faced by LGBT people] can only be fleshed out by large-scale data collection—and such information will make it a lot easier to get the resources needed to fix problems like the extremely high rates of poverty experienced by transgender people and gaps in parental rights affecting gay couples with children, particularly if the numbers have the authority of being produced by the government itself.

This news comes shortly after last week’s big news that the Department of Health & Human Services is planning to eliminate questions about sexual orientation from its National Survey of Older Americans. (One of our Senior Editors, Heather Hogan, has been working on a story about this that we’ll be publishing next week.)

Although I cannot find independent verification of this, the pro-Trump propaganda machine The Washington Times (which I refuse to link to, but here’s a screenshot) claims a Census Bureau spokesman had determined there was “no federal need” for collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity. In an alleged statement, said spokesman said:

“The Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey report released today inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix. This topic is not being proposed to Congress for the 2020 Census or American Community Survey.”

This will be good news for the readers of The Washington Times, who earlier today were very concerned about Uncle Sam “prodding” you for this information.

This will be bad news for… everybody here.

Trans People Are More Racially Diverse Than the General Population, New Study Finds

feature image via Shutterstock

Trans people are more racially and ethnically diverse than the U.S. general population, finds a new study by The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

In “Race and Ethnicity of Adults who Identify as Transgender in the United States,” the researchers used data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a state-level, population-based survey to compile their study. They found trans people are less likely to be white and more likely to be Latinx or Black than the general U.S. population. Among the survey-takers who identified as transgender, 55 percent identify as white, 16 percent identify as African-American or black, 21 percent identify as Latino or Hispanic, and 8 percent identify as another race or ethnicity. Here’s how that looks like compared to the U.S. general population:

At least one prior study, with smaller sample sizes, has had similar results, showing trans individuals as more racially and ethnically diverse than the US as a whole — it “found that in Massachusetts adults who identify as transgender are significantly less likely to identify as White and more likely to identify as Latino or Hispanic than the non-transgender adult population.” But the Williams Institute study is the first to give an estimate of the racial makeup of trans adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. (In contrast, the racial makeup of the sample size for Injustice At Every Turn, the report on the national transgender discrimination survey, was 83% white.)

The study also finds that the racial demographic patterns of where trans adults live are similar to the broader racial demographic patterns found throughout the United States. For example, the highest percentage of trans Latinx people are found in the Southwest, just like there’s a larger percentage of Latinxs who live there in general.

“While our study confirms that people who identify as transgender are racially and ethnically diverse, the question remains as to why transgender people are more diverse than others,” Taylor N.T. Brown, a Public Policy Analyst at the Williams Institute, said in a press release. “We need more research before we can answer that question.”

More Brits Than Ever Are In Between on the Kinsey Scale, New Survey Shows

feature image via shutterstock

In poll results published Sunday by YouGov, a full 49% of 18-24 year olds identified as something other than exclusively heterosexual. The online poll asked 1632 adults in Great Britain to identify themselves on the seven-point Kinsey scale. Among respondents of all ages, 72% identified as a 0 (heterosexual), 4% identified as a 6 (homosexual), and 23% identified somewhere in between. Breaking the data down by age group, however, shows a very interesting trend.

According to the report:

With each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18-24 year-olds are particularly striking, as 43% place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52% place themselves at one end or the other. … People of all generations now accept the idea that sexual orientation exists along a continuum rather than a binary choice – overall 60% of heterosexuals support this idea, and 73% of homosexuals. 28% of heterosexuals believe that ‘there is no middle ground – you are either heterosexual or you are not’.

This report is largely in line with existing research, including the 2013 British Social Attitudes survey showing growing acceptance of same-sex relationships in the UK, and the 2014 HRC report showing that 40% of US LGBT youth are non-monosexual.

Interestingly, when asked to label their sexuality, only 2% of all respondents self-identified as bisexual. This remained relatively steady across all age groups, increasing to 4% identification for those 25-39, and down to 1% for those 60+. Comparatively, 89% identified as heterosexual, 6% gay or lesbian, 3% prefer not to say, and 1% other. Even accounting for those listing themselves as “other” and “prefer not to say,” this leaves ~15% of respondents who presumably call themselves straight yet experience some level of same-sex attraction. And in even further proof that straight chicks want to make out with you, a surprising 35% of hetero-identified people responded with a “definitely,” “maybe,” or “very unlikely, but not impossible” when directly asked “If the right person came along at the right time, do you think it is conceivable that you could have a sexual experience with a person of the same sex?”

While collecting solid data about LGBT populations is always a difficult task, it seems telling to me that there’s such a large divide between the number of apparent bisexuals (the 23% plotting themselves as Kinsey 1-5’s) versus the number of people actively laying claim to the label (again, a mere 2%). Kinsey himself never used the word “bisexual” in relation to his work, because he felt it “implied a biological origin of bisexuality rather than a psychic one.” I doubt this is the motivating factor for many survey respondents in 2015.

One possible reason for the disparity is that people experiencing attraction to multiple genders don’t feel comfortable using the label until they’ve had sexual encounters with both same and different sex partners. However, 17% of respondents (20% of females and 14% of males) reported a sexual experience with a person of the same sex. Different-sex experiences were not reported on, but whatever the number, it still leaves a sizeable gap. Are the 1’s and 5’s not counting themselves because they don’t feel bisexual enough? The 2’s and 4’s? Unfortunately we don’t have enough data to say.

Certainly, coming out as bisexual poses unique challenges, and if someone feels more comfortable with an alternate label, they should have the individual agency to do what’s right for them. I personally use different labels in different contexts, as do many others. But there’s power in naming things as they are, and sometimes I wonder what impact avoidance of the term “bisexual” has. For example, would bisexual women have better mental health if more people identified as bi and there was a larger, more visible community? Would the allotment of resources change if all those Kinsey 2-5’s were counted up? What happens if we don’t do anything? I don’t have the answers, but apparently, there are more us than ever. I hope we figure some of it out soon.

Where Do Lesbians Live? New Gallup Numbers Add More Numbers To Pile Of Confusing Numbers

Gallup released the results of a poll last week that aimed to determine which of the U.S.’s 50 top metropolitan area has the highest percentage of the adult population who identify as LGBT. San Francisco came out on top with 6.2% of the population identifying as LGBT, followed by Portland, Austin, New Orleans, Seattle, Boston, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Denver and Hartford, Connecticut. Gallup notes that “the top ten includes metro areas from every region of the country except the Midwest.”

But those numbers tell a deceptively simple story (and an incomplete one, since the numbers are obviously inaccurate — more on this in a bit). The more complicated one is this: when it comes to geography, you can’t really lump every letter in the LGBTQ acronym together anymore (if you ever could). As the population of out LGBTQ folks across the country increases, so does the space between where the boys live and where the girls and non-binary folks live. In The Pacific Standard Magazine, sociologist Lisa Wade looked at this particular phenomenon last week — why lesbians and gay men don’t live in the same areas — drawing on the Gallup data and inspired by last month’s Contexts article, “Lesbian Geographies.” “Most of us are familiar with the idea of a “gayborhood,” a neighborhood enclave that attracts gay men,” writes Wade. “It turns out that lesbians have enclaves, too, but they’re not always the same ones.”

This isn’t news to me: I’m a person who decided to leave New York for San Francisco and decided immediately upon arriving in the Bay that I actually wanted to move to Oakland. I’m in Berkeley now, but we can’t afford to stay much longer and are currently plotting a move back to the Midwest. I know it’ll be quite an adjustment because, well, Oakland and Berkeley are teeming with lesbians. We are everywhere and gay men are not. Sometimes I go to Trader Joe’s and wonder if I’m at A-Camp. I never worry about holding my girlfriend’s hand in public. There’s a women’s-only area in my local YMCA.

The city of San Francisco is an entirely different story, though: I see maybe one lesbian for every 20 gay men I spot in The Castro. There may be a lot of dykes hanging out in Dolores Park, but they’re usually going home to Oakland at the end of the night, or to far-flung crash pads in neighborhoods you can’t walk to from The BART. The Mission and Noe Valley, once legendarily “checkered with lesbian-themed bookstores, bars, gyms and discotheques” where “groups of single women shacked up together in giant housing collectives, drank coffee companionably at the women-only Artemis Cafe, opened small businesses along the Valencia street corridor” and “formed ad hoc political groups,” isn’t the same place Michelle Tea told me about in Valencia. 

San Francisco Weekly‘s 2014 Pride Issue featured a cover story about why gay women were “fleeing to the suburbs” while “their gay male counterparts are flocking to San Francisco’s most desirable and costly neighborhoods.” Author Rachel Swan noted, “all over the country, lesbian districts are evaporating, even as their gay counterparts — places like the Castro, West Hollywood near L.A., Chelsea in New York, and D.C.’s Dupont Circle — are becoming more affluent, and staying close to the city center. The reasons for this are many, and open to conjecture, but the trend is undeniable.” The primary reason, of course, is money: we make less money than men and can’t afford to live in the same neighborhoods. There’s often interesting divisions happening within states, too, like the 2010 Census Data that suggested that while same-sex female couples are more likely to live in Northern California, gay couples prefer SoCal. Gay men love the beach and ladies love the trees and the mountains, maybe.

When I lived in New York, from 2004-2010, I saw quickly that legendary “gayborhoods” like the West Village and Chelsea were almost exclusively male. Although lesbians were known to be living in areas of Brooklyn like Red Hook and Park Slope, I found plenty in neighborhoods simply known for being relatively inexpensive, like Spanish Harlem and Morningside Heights. In 2005, The New York Times declared that even Park Slope was no longer enjoying “the cultural cachet of being New York’s premier lesbian neighborhood,” noting that “as happened with the gay scene in the West Village, its reputation has somewhat outlived its reality, especially for many younger lesbians.” A 63-year-old Lesbian Herstory Archives coordinator told The Times that although she’d enjoyed a thriving feminist lesbian community in Park Slope in the ’60s and ’70s, it was already losing its dykey base in the ’80s, when “Wall Street companies were giving prospective employees bus tours of Park Slope, a once-edgy neighborhood that had become prime real estate.” They cite a Brooklyn Historical Society report that showed that “many lesbians, mostly Latinas and younger women, were being priced out of Park Slope even in the early 90’s.”

It’s not just that lesbians are moving to the suburbs or outer boroughs of gay meccas, though, they’re often shacking up somewhere else entirely. “Lesbian couples are more likely than gay ones to live in rural areas, in part because they seek different things from their hometowns,” Francie Diep writes in The Geography of Queer Folks, summarizing Lisa Wade’s conclusions. “For example, lesbian couples are much more likely than gay couples to be raising children, the costs of which might be lower outside of cities.” This is perhaps consistent with a recent survey that showed most same-sex couples raising children are doing so in the South. Or, as Lisa Wade summed up one theory on why lesbians might be more comfortable in the rural south than gay men: “If being “butch” is normative for people living in rural environments, lesbians who perform masculinity might fit in better than gay men who don’t.” There’s also a strong tradition of rural lesbian communes and rural queer women’s lands, which continues today.

Maize, a Lesbian Country Magazine, published 1982-1997. Maize was originally published out of Preston Hollow, NY, then Minneapolis, MN and then Serafina, New Mexico.

There’s a lot to chew on with all this information, old and new — especially for me, as I’ve been tracking this particular mystery for six years and have been consistently surprised by the wildly disparate data available on the topic, both in terms of where LGBTQ women live and which places are most friendly to LGBTQ women. Most evaluations of LGBTQ geography lump men and women together, despite the fact that the two subcultures rarely overlap in practice, thus rendering themselves useless to lesbians. As we’ve documented, counting queer folks in general has been a challenge for the world, let alone nailing down those queer folks to particular geographical areas and drawing significant conclusions from that information. Even the Gallup poll that prompted last week’s conversation has a plus or minus 1% margin of sampling error at the 95% confidence level, which means the specific ranking of any particular city — as they’re all within one or two percentage points as the cities above and below them — isn’t readily apparent, just its general ranking. 2012 Gallup data about which states had the highest percentage of LGBTQ residents revealed that “the variation in the percentage of adults across U.S. states who identify themselves as LGBTQ is relatively small” and cautioned against drawing significant conclusions from the data, aside from the general conclusion that “states with proportionally larger LGBT populations generally have supportive LGBT legal climates.”

We’re apparently starved for this information, though, and won’t stop looking for it or trying to summon it. The Advocate does its own annual ranking of the most gay-friendly cities, using different criteria every time. Last year’s equation factored in LGBT elected officials, lesbian-coupled households, gay rodeos, gay bars, women’s colleges and “concerts by Mariah Carey, Pink, Lady Gaga and The Jonas Brothers.” The rankings often seem designed to produce controversial results — like in 2011, when Minneapolis, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh, Orlando and Las Vegas snagged the top five spots and New York and Los Angeles didn’t even rank.

The Advocate’s 2012 criteria

In 2012, I took a crack at making a list of our own, entitled “The 21 Most Lesbianish Cities In The US,” looking at factors like our own reader location statistics from Google Analytics, Tegan & Sara concerts, LGBT-friendly colleges, LGBT or feminist bookstores, lesbian nightlife, inclusive ENDA policies, same-sex marriage legislation, and rankings from magazines like The Advocate and The Daily Beast. That year we also undertook the Queer Girl City Guides Project, where we solicited locals to tell the world about their homes and native lands. Despite the hordes of readers and writers we’ve got in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, those cities have been the hardest to find guide authors for — but we easily secured guides for cities like Spokane, Durham, Burlington, Pensacola, Madison, Columbia, Gainseville and Saratoga Springs. Our most popular City Guide is the one about Columbus, Ohio.

For the book There Goes the Gayborhood? by Amin Ghaziani, statistics ended up being only a small part of the research he drew on. He focused primarily on an analysis of 617 newspaper articles on the topic from all over the United Sates and by interviewing 125 gay and straight Chicago residents. This is a subject that requires looking at lots of data sets, lots of articles and drawing on lots of personal experiences to come up with anything like a comprehensive picture. So let’s do that.

The Numbers

First let’s look at the geographic data we have about all LGBT people, including the data released by Gallup last week. Here’s what they learned about the LGBTQ populations of the U.S.’s major metropolitan areas, compared to 2000 census data, and ranked in order of the percentage of the population in each area identifying as LGBTQ:

Unfortunately, there’s no breakdown of this data by gender. The best we can do in that department is to compare it to the data we have from our own readers, who are mostly queer women. In our 2014 Autostraddle reader survey, which had 3,455 respondents, we asked “if you live in the United States, which, if any, of the following cities is closest to you?” I then took that data and grouped together cities considered by the U.S. Census to be part of the same Metropolitan area to see how it compares to the data above.

Of course, the 2014 Autostraddle Reader Survey has a lot of demographic specificities besides sexual orientation that could explain why we live where we live: like that the majority of survey-takers are between the ages of 18 and 34, 49% are single, 90% have been to college and 96% didn’t have kids. It’s not data that’d stand up in a research journal or paper, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that these women are Autostraddle readers, which suggests an interest in queer community in general that not all queer people share. Our Google Analytics metro-area data reports traffic in this order: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco / Oakland / San Jose, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Seattle, Atlanta, Portland, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Denver and, finally, Detroit.

On the other end of the demographic spectrum we have data that looks only at same-sex couples, as counted by the U.S Census. The “Lesbian Geographies” piece in Contexts (written by the author of There Goes the Gayborhood?) drew on Trulia’s analysis of 2010 U.S. Census Data, which revealed a market that “looks different for gay men and women, who often cluster in very different neighborhoods even in the same metro.” This chart has Trulia’s zip code analysis, as well as the straightforward by-city ranking directly from the census.

The New York Times looked at the zip code data set and determined its most surprising element was “how far same-sex couples have dispersed, moving from traditional enclaves and safe havens into farther-flung areas of the country.” They suggested that baby boomers were retiring and moving away from places like West Hollywood and San Francisco towards places like Pleasant Ridge, Michigan (population 2,569) and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware (population 1,398). But are these numbers really large enough to be meaningful? Trulia says Rehoboth Beach, for example, has a 2.4% share of same-sex female couples — with a population of 1,398, that means there are 33 lesbians in Rehoboth Beach. That’s not a lot of lesbians!

Here’s the first bit of information regarding “huh well, these numbers seem off” — Trulia says West Hollywood consists of 8.9% gay households. But West Hollywood did its own survey and found 41% of the WeHo population is gay and bisexual men and 5% of the population was lesbians and bisexual women. So — grain of salt.

So, two last sets of Autostraddle-related numbers: we asked the 6,058 United States residents who filled out our Lesbian Sex Survey two months ago (open to all women who had sex with women, and drawing on a more diverse population than the Reader Survey) what state they lived in, and when comparing the percentage of survey-takers who live in each state compared to the percentage of U.S. residents overall who live in each state, a few things stand out enough to be noted here. Lesbian sex survey-takers are…

• Slightly more likely than the general population to live in California, New York, Illinois or Washington
• Way more likely than the general population to live in Massachusetts or Oregon
• Slightly less likely than the general population to live in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Indiana

Finally, we have this infographic from The Williams Institute about where one might find the most same-sex couples raising children. This shows what percentage of the same-sex couples in each city reported that they are raising children under the age of 18. So, for example, 22% of same-sex couples in Detroit said they were raising children under the age of 18.

Because female same-sex couples are more likely to be raising children than male same-sex couples, it stands to reason that the cities highlighted above skew more lesbian than gay. Same-sex couple parents and their children are also more likely to be of color than different-sex couples, and the high rankings of cities like San Antonio (63.2% Hispanic/Latino), Detroit (83% black) and Memphis (62.6% black), could reflect that trend.

Beyond the Numbers

via lesbian separatist

Let’s be real: a lot of these numbers are admittedly imprecise and many of them are just simply and obviously wrong! (This isn’t news to the statisticians and researchers, I should add — they recognize the limitations of their numbers, and the inherent challenges in surveying LGBTQ populations.)  As I mentioned above, although the Census reported West Hollywood to be 8.9% queer, West Hollywood’s own demographers found its residents to be 41% queer men and 5% queer women. If their numbers about the East Bay were right, maybe there wouldn’t be such long lines at Ships in the Night.

The government only tracks co-habitating same-sex couples. Gallup only records people who are interested in revealing their sexual orientation or gender identity to a stranger on the phone. It’s hard to say if people who live in cities like Birmingham, Alabama, which landed squarely at the bottom of Gallup’s list of the most LGBT-occupied cities, are less likely to be LGBTQ or just less likely to say so. I mean, Birmingham scored a 9 out of 100 on the HRC’s Municipal Equality Index.

Plus, 6% of a neighborhood being gay does not a gayborhood make, regardless of how small a percentage of the population we are. Asian-Americans make up about 5% of the entire US population, but Mission Hills – Vineyards North in San Francisco, considered a top “Asian-American neighborhood,” is 74.6% Asian-American. LGBTQ people are between 3% and 10% of the population, depending on which survey you believe, and our #1 gayest neighborhood according to Gallup, The Castro, is just 6.2% LGBTQ. Have you been to The Castro? It is way more than 6.2% LGBTQ! Portland, the whitest large city in America, is 6.3% black. It’s considered the second-gayest city on Gallup’s list… and is supposedly 5.4% gay? Have you been to Portland?

At the very least, if LGBTQs comprise around 5% of the entire U.S. population, our numbers ought to hover around 5% in most places, and far exceed 5% in the areas where we allegedly gather. Pick up the local LGBTQ Weekly in any of the metro-areas listed above and you’ll see that with the amount of shit going on, there’s definitely more gay people in these areas than the Census or Gallup is uncovering. Although lesbians seem unable to support dedicated local lesbian bars, they’re flocking in droves to girls nights, local roller derby teams, lesbian softball leagues, organized “queer brunches,” pop-up queer barbershops and other spaces like readings, protests, The Planet and basketball games. “Lesbians like to hunker down and stay in,” a lesbian Chicago resident told Amin Ghaziani. “We like to stay on our patios, drink our beer, and have our barbecues. That’s why you don’t see us walking around… women have house parties or gatherings, or we would rather go out to dinner — but in small social settings. Not to say that women don’t go out to bars, but generally speaking, it takes a lot of effort to draw women out to bars.”

Furthermore, the overall demographic of LGBTQs doesn’t jive with the demographics of the areas where we allegedly live. LGBTQs are more likely to be of color, but the neighborhoods cited as gayborhoods are overwhelmingly white. Queer women and trans people are more likely to be poor, but the neighborhoods cited as gayborhoods are overwhelmingly rich. In There Goes the Gayborhood?, Ghaziani noted from his interviews with queer people of color, “The social and residential choices that people of color make resemble those of same-sex families. The outer ring, or the most general residential (and social) filter, is the ethnic community… Within this, many people of color seek a “queer safe space.”” Later in the book, Ghaziani (a gay man of color himself) says that, “in an act of exquisite agency, queer people of color are forming new gayborhoods of their own, rather than disappearing off our cultural map.”

These are just some of the reasons why, when it comes to gayborhoods, numbers from places like Gallup and the U.S. Census are important, but so are lived experiences, newspaper articles and random surveys of lesbians who read this website. Any information is useful information when the official information is so light on, well… information.

But looking at where they started can help us figure out where they’re going.

Gayborhoods: A Tiny History

The Green Door on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, 1955. (via Remembering LA’s Earliest Lesbian Bars

Gayborhoods originally began to thrive after World War II, when a few things happened: gays and lesbians, newly exposed to a freer sexual society in Europe, opted to remain in military base cities rather than return to their hometowns. Gays and lesbians who’d been discharged for homosexual conduct moved into “self-protective” “refugee camps” (terms employed by activist Carl Wittman) in cities like Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Philadelphia, New York, Miami and New Orleans.

The push for women to join the workforce during the war resulted in many queer women finally achieving financial independence from their home community but even moreso enabled those who’d been working in factories since their teen years to blend in. “In their minds,” write Kennedy and Davis in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, “the important effect of the war was to give more independence to all women, thereby making lesbians more like other women and less easy to identify.” It became less unusual for women to have independent income, socialize in exclusively-female social groups, and walk home at all hours without a male companion. Industrial centers like Buffalo, New York, became hot spots for lesbians. In San Francisco, many gay women joined the Woman’s Army Corps, headquartered in the Presidio. Believe it or not, one patron recalls that in the ’50s, there were more lesbian bars than gay bars in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco because “fewer doors were open through normal channels (work, clubs, organizations) for women to meet other women of a like mind.”

Meanwhile, a thriving lesbian population had been building in Los Angeles since the turn of the century, as Hollywood was basically the only industry offering women an a way to get rich independent of her family. Businesses sprang up catering to these new populations, and after New York City’s Stonewall riots in 1969, the “great gay migration” (as it is described by anthropologist Kath Weston) of the 1970s and 1980s began, with gays and lesbians moving to cities in search of community just as those same cities were experiencing “white flight.” Justin Ocean wrote in The Advocate (as quoted in There Goes the Gayborhood?) that “the cycle of queer pioneers turning the dilapidated into destinations seems to be an intrinsic fact of gay life.”

Of course, by the late ’90s, people were already saying that gayborhoods were being overwhelmed by straights and facing an impending demise. “Gayborhoods long provided sexual minorities with a safe space in an often unsafe world,” writes Amin Ghaziani in There Goes The Gayborhood? “But now the world itself is becoming much safer.” There are so many reasons and theories for the overall decline of gayborhoods that we could talk about for days, but today we’re aiming to reach a conclusion about gendered geographies. So, to that end, it bears mentioning that if anybody’s sticking around in the “gayborhoods,” it’s gay men. They can afford it, they’re less likely to have kids, more likely to have the kind of extra income you need to enjoy an urban lifestyle and, as Ghaziani points out in “lesbian geographies,” “Gay men are more influenced by sexual transactions and building commercial institutions like bars, big night clubs, saunas, and trendy restaurants, while gay women are motivated by feminism and countercultures.” Furthermore, women are less able to own real estate and open businesses that’d mark the neighorhood as their own. In a Time Out Chicago April Fools’ article making fun of the lesbians who’d seen Chicago’s Girlstown evolve into a Boystown, moved to Andersonville, and now wanted to ensure Andersonville remained as girls’ town, the magazine quoted “out activist Pat Bushman” pointing out that “There are more than 25,000 dykes living on the North Side, and frankly, I’d like to see the city try and live without the $1,879 we spend annually on bars and nightlife.”

Sadly, the influx of moneyed residents has resulted in San Francisco becoming remarkably unfriendly to the queer and trans youth who once relied on its streets and services, a transformation already happening in New York, where development threatens the thriving community of homeless queer and trans youth who rely on the community found at the Christopher Street piers.

“San Francisco is a textbook example of what happens when gay people become part of the power structure,” writes Matilda Bernstein Sycamore in City of Brotherly Love. “They engineer the election of anti-poor pro-development candidates over and over and over again; they advise property owners on how to get rid of long-term tenants; they fight against the construction of a queer youth shelter because it might impact community property values; they arrest homeless queers for getting in the way of happy hour.” It’s unsurprising that these climates quickly edge out many lesbians as well as queers of color and trans people.

Ghaziani also points out that lesbians tend to move out of a male-dominated gayborhood because… well… men.

Do Queer Women Flock To Queer-Friendly Areas?

Oakland, California, 1976 (© Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS)

Gallup says it did a survey in 2013 that found only 12% of LGBT adults “considered the levels of LGBT social acceptance in a city as a major factor in their decisions about where to live,” which struck me as wildly improbable. I don’t know any queer woman who doesn’t consider that element when deciding where to live — but maybe the fact that I’ve chosen to live in places like Ann Arbor, New York and the East Bay means that I’ll obviously know a lot of people who have considered that factor.

But a lot of queer women never considered that factor because they’ve never had a chance to choose where to live in the first place. You stay where you grew up, where your family is, where your job is. You stay somewhere because you can’t afford to move elsewhere.

We asked our readers about the gay-friendliness of their home in our Autostraddle Grown-Ups Survey, which garnered over 4,000 responses from readers 29 and up. The data revealed that either most of the world is gay-friendly, or a lot of you have migrated to gay-friendly places. 38% of you live in very LGBTQ-friendly areas, 27% in somewhat LGBTQ-friendly areas and 15% in legendarily LGBTQ-friendly areas (e.g., San Francisco, Chicago). Of those who didn’t report living in an LGBTQ-friendly area, 10% reported their area as “neutral” to LGBTQs, 2% weren’t sure, 7% reported a “somewhat hostile” environment. Only 1.47% of respondents said their area was “very hostile” and only .37% said it was unsafe to be “out” where they live. I imagine that many living in hostile areas didn’t make a “choice” to live there — it’s where they’re from, where their family is, where they could find a job or where they’ve always been.

The Municipal Equality Index, put together by the HRC, ranks 353 cities on their gay-friendliness — while acknowledging that the numbers can’t replace lived experience of the city’s friendliness. It is worth noting that a few areas considered gay meccas did not score that well — Ferndale, MI got a 57, while East Lansing scored 100. Miami, Florida got a 53, while Orlando scored 100. Still, the majority of cities with large gay populations scored high on the municipal equality index.

There’s a general sense of inevitable acceptance, though, that results in people like me deciding to move back to areas of the Midwest that presently lack legal protections. Even if things aren’t great now, the sense that things will change eventually might turn back the tides of lesbian migration. We’ve been forced to pay a hefty premium to live amongst our own and many of us are ready to settle down somewhere cheap as soon as it’s safe to do so. Although Gallup said that no Midwestern metropolitan areas showed up in its top ten, some of our most active Straddler Meet-Up Groups are in the Midwest: Cincinnati, Chicago and Minneapolis.

So, Where Do Lesbians Live?

Lesbian wedding in New York with dresses made by Dangerous Mathematicians, photography by Parris Whittingham Studio, via wikipedia commons

The simple answer: everywhere. We often live in the same cities as gay men but can rarely afford the same neighborhoods, and we’re more likely to skip town to start families in more affordable areas with better public schools. Lesbian bars and women’s bookstores, once anchors of lesbian neighborhoods, are shuttering epidemically, but there are other social hubs for lesbians that continue thriving and reveal consistent trends in lesbian geography.

For example, lesbians are more likely to be involved in academia — as students or as professors — and to cluster on or near college campuses. Women’s colleges and other universities with strong queer communities are all over New England, which seems to host a disproportionately large lesbian population. Boston and Cambridge, specifically, have been lesbian enclaves for centuries — recall the “Boston Marriages” of the 19th century — and seem to remain so. A college town is likely to offer many of the cultural benefits of a city, including liberal politics, independent businesses and museums; but with lower rent, more green space, and good public schools for kids. Northampton (home of Smith College) has more lesbians per capita than any town or city in the country and is part of what’s made Western Massachusetts so damn queer. There are also high lesbian populations in college towns like Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Madison, Ithaca and Raleigh-Durham. Oakland is touted as having the highest lesbians per capita rate, and there’s a rich history in The East Bay — former Oakland residents include Gertrude Stein, Holly Near, Pat Parker, Angela Davis and Audre Lorde; and many of its buildings were designed by (allegedly) lesbian architect Julia Morgan. The North Oakland / South Berkeley area has long been lesbian territory, and is refreshingly racially diverse as well. But the tech boom in the city is pushing rents to unfathomably high rates, which is already trickling into the East Bay. It’s hard to know how long it’ll remain affordable for queers of color, young queer women, trans and non-binary folks.

photo taken in The Brick Hut restaurant, a worker-owned feminist collective in Berkeley, via found sf

When we did the 21 Most Lesbianish Cities report, the comments lit up with queer women professing the greatness of their cities and proclaiming them the gayest city ever: Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Tuscon, Austin, Salt Lake City, Columbus, Miami, Houston, Burlington, Asheville, San Diego, Minneapolis… and on and on. There’s stuff happening, but a lot of it is just under the surface.  “Lesbian neighborhoods… consist of clusters of homes located near countercultural institutions, like artsy theaters, bike shops, and cooperative grocery stores,” writes Ghaziani. “This gives them a quasi-underground character, and makes them seem more hidden.”

Does this mean we’ve all assimilated? Does it mean we don’t need lesbian neighborhoods anymore? Does it mean the men have kicked us out of the best places to be? Nope. But it does mean that now, if you’re in a position to decide where to live, you don’t have to pick between a place with lesbians or a place without lesbians, but rather can choose whether or not the lesbians you want to hang out with, work with, and run into at Whole Foods live there. There may not be many lesbian bars left for someone to walk into and find people like them, but you can still walk onto the internet and find people like you who live where you live, and then just pick a place to hang out in 3-D, and do so.

Final Thoughts

There are many limitations to the survey and research on this topic. It’s unclear if any transgender people were included in any of these counts or if the “T” was just slapped on to the acronym out of force of habit. There’s also no data on how racially diverse these LGBTQ populations are. Picking a place to live as a queer woman of color adds layers of anxiety to an already complicated decision-making process — not only must they wonder if the alleged gayborhood is primarily men, but also if it’s primarily white.

There’s definitely no data on the best places for trans women to live — we’re currently looking to rectify that, so if you have tips, please email our trans editor, Mey Rude, who is putting together that list. (mey [at] autostraddle [dot] com)

We’re also looking to put together a list of 21 Underrated Lesbianish Places To Live to draw attention to cities and towns with significant populations of queer women that aren’t often acknowledged as such. For this, we desperately need your input, and welcome it in the comments. We’re especially interested in towns and cities with thriving QTPOC populations and resources. So let us know!

So, I turn to you, queer women of this country: where do you live? Is it friendly to LGBTQ women? Does the gay-friendliness of a place influence your desire to live there? Are there misconceptions about the gayness of your town / city / village?

How Many People Are Queer? Probably More Than Two Percent

In a federal report released on Tuesday, the 2013 National Health Interview Survey found that just 2% of Americans over the age of 18 identify as gay or lesbian — or at least, that’s the factoid making splashy headlines. In fact, gathering accurate statistics on the overall number of LGBT people is a longstanding issue, and a follow up report by the same agency reveals that their 2% weighted estimate on LGB people (out of the almost 35,000 people originally surveyed) is almost certainly too low. Transgender identity isn’t formally addressed at all.

The NHIS Quality Assessment report states,

A small number of sexual minorities (n=5) who identify as something other than gay/lesbian or bisexual were identified, and a number of responses were reflective of a sexual identity in flux (e.g., “not figured out or in the process of figuring out your sexuality”). More concerning are the 45 respondents who indicated that they did not understand the words used with the initial sexual orientation question. While this number appears small, so was the total number of adults identifying as bisexual (n=233). If those respondents who struggled with the terminology would ultimately identify as a sexual minority, the estimates for gay/lesbian and bisexual could be impacted substantially.
…
Given the very low percentage of adults identifying as gay/lesbian and bisexual, if nonresponse to the question is related to respondents’ sexual orientation (a case of nonignorable nonresponse; Little and Rubin, 1987), the potential for bias in estimates of sexual minorities is considerable.

In plain English: not everyone responded to the questions about sexual orientation, and there’s a good chance that many of them they didn’t answer specifically because they’re queer. In spite of recent political gains, there are still plenty of reasons why queer people might choose not to come out, either in a survey or in their day to day lives. As Andrew Markle at Bilerico aptly observed, “Data is data, but people are people and that is the unpredictable variable in this entire equation.”

Unfortunately, underestimation of the LGBT population often has political ramifications. In today’s society, respect is rarely received on the basis of shared humanity alone; in order for people to “count,” they need to be quantified as voters, consumers and supporters. As Carolyn has written, many feel that the fewer gay people there are, the less important gay issues become.

Considering how difficult it is to make people give a fuck, we might be better served to focus on getting better data.

Feature image via Corporate Ink

New Gallup Poll Answers the Question “How Gay Is Your State?”

In June 2012, Gallup, one of the world’s largest and most reputable polling companies, added the question “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?” to their Gallup Daily tracking poll. When they released the first batch of data in October 2012, it was already noteworthy for being the largest to date. Now, four months later, it’s nearly twice as big, having garnered over 200,000 responses from all across the country. The estimated proportion of LGBT citizens nationwide has stayed about the same — it’s now at 3.5%, up from 3.4% — but there is now enough data to come up with state-by-state percentages, too, as there were over 1,000 respondents in all but eight states. This is very exciting for everyone who likes numbers and trends, as well as those of us who like to stand in our local coffee shops and try to figure out the exact Queer Quotient.

You can go here to find a state-by-state table and a fun mouseover map, but here are some vitals:

• Washington, D.C. has the highest reported proportion of LGBT people, a cool 10%.  This is nearly twice as high as the runner-up, Hawaii, which reports 5.1%.
• The following eight: Vermont, Oregon, Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Nevada, and California.
• North Dakota is at the bottom of the chart, clocking in with 1.7%.
• If you take out D.C., the spread of percentages, from Hawaii at #2 to North Dakota at #50, is a mere 3.4%. As the analysis points out, this very small variation “may run counter to some stereotypes that portray the LGBT community as heavily grouped in certain states of the union,” such as urban areas.
• The highest red state on the list is South Dakota, at #8 (4.4%).  The lowest blue state is Pennsylvania, at #43 (2.7%).

“I WAS TALKING ABOUT D.C. THE WHOLE TIME, GUYS” – KINSEY

Gallup has begun to crunch its new numbers with older ones, beginning by comparing LGBT presence to political ideology. Results are unsurprising: their 10 Most LGBT States list and their 10 Most Liberal States list have seven members in common; 10 Least LGBT States and Top 10 Conservative States have six. South Dakota is the only state that houses over 4% LGBT people and lacks anti-discrimination and partnership laws. They’re also trying to figure out why there’s any variation at all — do LGBT people move to more supportive areas, or are LGBT people in less supportive areas less likely to tell the truth to a telephone pollster? David Mariner, who runs the Center for the LGBT Community in D.C., thinks it’s the former, calling the study “a good indicator of where people feel comfortable living and where people want to live.” Dave Lanpher of Fargo, North Dakota’s Human Relations Commission, thinks it’s the latter, and suspects an undercount. The study’s founders, who are probably less biased, also lean towards the second explanation, as their report has also found that most LGBT people are also young, nonwhite, and female, three “groups with economic disadvantages that could limit their abilities to move.”

As we’ve discussed before, counting gays is problematic sociologically and philosophically. And even if, as study author Gary J. Gates argues, it’s still worth it, it’s pretty difficult logistically, too. We are a community that, generally speaking, does not enjoy neat little boxes of the confining or pencil-checking variety (of course, some of us do enjoy them, which makes us even more unboxable overall). Asking people whether they consider themselves L, G, B or T might leave out those who identify better with other letters. It also leaves out everyone who is uncomfortable sharing information about their sexuality. So a study like this is less a rack of hard data and more a representation of people who, in Gallup’s words, “publicly identify themselves as part of the LGBT community when asked in a survey context.”

“I’M SORRY BUT THAT’S BETWEEN ME AND MY SUPER-HOT GIRLFRIEND . . . WAIT, OOPS”

Still, it’s better than nothing. Immediate effects will include new potential pickup lines (“hey California girl, are you in the 4.0%? ‘Cause you’re lookin’ 100% good”), some nifty infographics, more fuel for the coast-vs-coast rivalry, and a zillion think pieces about why D.C. is so disproportionately gay (I blame the Washington Monument). Long-term, hopefully studies like this will lead to increased knowledge, more visibility, and challenges to old associations between “gay” and “urban” and “Northeast” and “West Coast.” Maybe they’ll finally even ask about us on the U.S. Census! Then we could REALLY start crunching some numbers and taking some names.

Gallup Reports on Minuscule LGBT Population, Actually Gets Some Stuff Right

You gays! There’s a new study out about how many of us there are out there and this time they’re saying Club LGBT is even smaller than we thought. In what is the largest study to date of LGBT demographics in the U.S. — over 120,000 individuals were surveyed — Gallup reports that 3.4 percent of American adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Their results are similar to last year’s William’s Institute study that reported that 3.5 percent of the population is LGBT.

But before we get to the cold hard facts, let’s take a second to talk about their methodology. When it comes to statistics, looking at the research they performed tells us almost as much as the data. In this case, Gallup added a new question to their Gallup Daily tracking interviews starting in June. Along with questions about health, politics and other demographic information, respondents were asked, “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?” Of course, limiting the question to those four identities and grouping them together puts constraints on the study. Our genderqueer and pansexual brethren are just as queer as we are, but many of them are excluded from the data because they don’t “personally identify” as L, G, B or T.

Whether or not they’re aware that their wording excludes a significant segment of the rainbow, Gallup seems to recognize its limitations and is upfront about what their data does and does not tell us. They explain that they “chose the broad measure of personal identification as LGBT because this grouping of four statuses is commonly used in current American discourse, and as a result has important cultural and political significance.” They also realize that asking about self-identification during a phone interview won’t result in a figure that reflects the true number of queer people in the country:

Measuring sexual orientation and gender identity can be challenging since these concepts involve complex social and cultural patterns. As a group still subject to social stigma, many of those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender may not be forthcoming about this identity when asked about it in a survey. Therefore, it’s likely that some Americans in what is commonly referred to as “the closet” would not be included in the estimates derived from the Gallup interviews. Thus, the 3.4% estimate can best be represented as adult Americans who publicly identify themselves as part of the LGBT community when asked in a survey context.“

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the key findings

+People of color are more likely to identify as LGBT than white respondents. 4.6% of Black interviewees, 4.3% of Asians, 4% of Hispanics and 3.2% of white identify as LGBT.

+Younger people are more likely to identify as LGBT. 6.4% of 18-29-year-olds, 3.2% of 30-49-years-olds, 2.6% of 50-64-year-olds and 1.9% of 65+-year-olds answered the interview question in the affirmative.

+Slightly more women identify as LGBT. Looking at the 18-29 age group, the gap greatly widens. LGBT people account for 8.3% of young women and only 4.6% of young men.

+LGBT people tends to have lower levels of education and income. The education cohort who identified most frequently as LGBT were those who’ve had some college. At 4%, they’re followed by individuals with a high school education or less, college graduates and people with a postgraduate education. LGBT people also accounted for the highest percentage of the population in the lowest earning brackets. They compose 5.1% of respondents who make less than $24,000 annually.

+Individuals in domestic partnerships and single people who have never married are more likely to be LGBT. 12.8% of domestic partners and 7% of singles are LGBT while only 1.3% of married people are.

+LGBT women are just as likely as non-LGBT women to be raising children. 32% of all women have a child under 18 living at their home. 31% of non-LGBT men are raising children while only 16% of LGBT men are.

Gallop Gallup

Do you know what I see here? Intersectionality! Microsoft Word might not know it’s a word, but we sure as hell do and we’re here to talk about it. When it comes to data like this, there’s still a lot that’s left to interpretation. For example, reading that many LGBT people are less educated and earn less money appears to be a dismal (although understandable, considering the history of discrimination) stat. But what if, instead of telling a story about LGBT people, it’s simply illustrating facts about what it’s like to be young in the U.S.? In an excellent breakdown of the education/income question, Jezebel shows how a lurking variable like age can totally change the way we see the situation. 24-year-olds (6.4% of whom are LGBT) are significantly less likely to earn $80,000 than 53-year-olds (LGBT rate: 2.6%). If we could control for age, we would have a better idea of what’s going on, causality-wise.

Similarly, relationship and parent status might benefit from a little three-way table action. One interpretation of the data that shows that roughly half as man LGBT men as non-LGBT men and all women are raising kids is to assume that women are naturally nurturers and that, without the companionship of women, men are unwilling or unable to care for children. It wouldn’t be the first time gay men would be stereotyped as shallow, apathetic party boys. Controlling for relationship status might reveal more about the structures of these families and allow us to consider alternatives that take custody laws (perhaps a gay woman is raising children from her former marriage to a man) or the difficulties of adoption (the high cost and various anti-gay state laws make it difficult for gay men to have children) into account.

One of the most inscrutable findings of the study revolves around race. Despite a lack of visibility of LGBT people of color in the media and, as Gallup themselves point out, enduring “stereotypes that portray the LGBT community as predominantly white, highly educated, and very wealthy,” 33 percent of respondents who identified as LGBT were people of color. While it’s difficult to find research that sheds much light on this outcome, this kind of information could help encourage further research on an often-overlooked segment of the community. It also helps fight back against damaging beliefs about people of color and their acceptance of queerness. The more we know about our mutual struggles and joys and our unique conflicts, the harder it becomes to tear each other down.

A larger study on LGBT identities takes us one step closer to what I hope to see happen some day soon: a queer question on the Census. It’s not just about recognizing our existence, it’s about knowing how to improve society. Each study written and every interview performed allows us, our neighbors and our government to know more about the queer experience. Even with its flaws, Gallup’s poll — and their promise to include the question on all future surveys — is a valuable tool for finding solutions to demonstrably real problems.

Lovers in a Quantified Time: Canadian Census Counts Queer Families

Hey Canadians! Time to peek into your neighbours’ windows without getting arrested! Remember last May when you filled out a short questionnaire about how you were living/who you were living with/whether you wanted someone to know what you did 92 years from now? Even if you don’t, other news agencies remembered and have been brandishing their calculators waiting for the confirmation that Canadian families have evolved beyond the nuclear family of the 1950s.

The statisticians and reporters were indeed correct, as families certainly have changed. Stats Canada released a portion of the 2011 census that examined household makeup and acknowledged “skip-generation families, intact families, simple step families, complex step families, opposite-sex families and same-sex families.”

In case you forgot, on July 25, 2005, Canada passed the Civil Marriage Act, making Canada the third country in the world where queers are treated as actual citizens. The first census in the wake of the law (just ten months later in 2006) showed that 7,465 same-sex couples had gotten married in that short period of time, but ten months isn’t much to go on in terms of  getting an accurate idea of the real frequency of same-sex marriage in Canada.

It’s been five years since the last census, and queer Canadians have not only had more time to plan and execute their nuptuals, but the world has become a better and more welcoming place for gays in general — so what does that mean for our numbers? Did all of the Gaynadians rush to the altar because we finally could? Did we completely erode the institution of marriage in so doing? Did we conjure that storm that NOM keeps talking about?

As it turns out, some of us got married and some of us didn’t! 21,015 same-sex couples proudly showed off their wedding bands, but almost double that amount were content with simply UHauling instead. Either way, more people are coming out of the closet and entering glitter-filled relationships as the number of same-sex couples rose by 42.4%. And even though the census shows that same-sex couples only make up 0.8% of all Canadian couples, remember that the stat ignores bisexuals and queers in opposite-sex relationships, people who aren’t dating and those that resisted the urge to merge. While the majority of couples (married or common-law) are gay men, female-female couples still represent 45.5%. Currently, same-sex couples tend to skew younger than opposite-sex couples, but that’ll surely change as queer couples have the opportunity to grow older together.

Queer couples are also starting families just like their opposite-sex counterparts, and of the 6,410 same-sex couples with children, 79% are being raised by two mothers. And now that there are more same-sex families raising children in “stable” homes, researchers like Mark Regerenus might finally be able to compare apples to apples instead of making incorrect reports about same-sex families.

And while the census endeavours to count everyone, it’s exceedingly difficult to capture all of the nuances of relationship structures. This Friday you can sign up to chat with Statistics Canada sociologist Anne Milan and learn a bit more about the process. In changing from the long form to the short form survey (with an optional National Household Survey instead), a treasure trove of information on Canadians has surely been missed. More consultation is needed for 2016, and hopefully something can be done to get a more accurate snapshot of the way that we live. Until November 16th you have the chance to make suggestions about the issues that matter to you, and hopefully someone will finally be able to write thoughtfully-worded questions about gay couples without accidentally counting same-sex roommates.

The 21 Most Lesbianish Cities in the US: The Autostraddle Guide

The Advocate’s Third List of America’s Gayest Cities got us thinking that somebody really ought to make a list for America’s Most Lesbionic Cities, yannow?

A lot of our readers wanted to know where they could meet other readers, so we gathered a bunch of data — including our site’s statistics — to put together this fantastic list which undoubtedly every soul on the planet will agree with 100%.  The Advocate‘s criteria this year included things like Veronicas concerts and Nude Yoga classes and somehow Grand Rapids made the Top Ten. This might be slightly more accurate than that.

The totally unscientific possibly dubious math breaks down as follows:

Autostraddler Population Statistics:
Based on numbers from Google Analytics, we looked at which cities/towns most Autostraddlers come from. But because clearly those numbers give large cities a huge advantage, we made a second list where we weighted those numbers based on each town’s population size. This ended up highly favoring smaller towns and college towns, which is unfair, just like life itself. Both rankings (unweighted & weighted) were factored into each city’s score.

Culture:
We distributed points for hosting Tegan & Sara concerts and/or Melissa Ferrick concerts, as well as for LGBT or Feminist bookstores, lesbian nightlife and LGBT-friendly colleges (per the Campus Pride Index and our LGBT College Guide — post and comments).

Political Climate:
We looked at who had inclusive ENDA policies, who had semi-inclusive ENDA policies, who allows same-sex marriage, who allows Civil Unions, etc. We used Lambda Legal as a reference for this section.

Other Lists:
Points were given to cities that ranked on The Advocate‘s list over the past three years as well as a recently published list by The Daily Beast, which was perhaps our best resource. The 20 Gayest Cities in America, which was created using the Gay/Lesbian Index developed by Gary Gates, a demographer at UCLA’s Williams Institute, are rankings based on actual population statistics of same-sex couples! Novel!

Resources Included: The US Census, Girlports, Wikipedia , The Williams Institute, GO! Magazine, Federation of Ideas

 This isn’t a perfect system, so be sure to respond with as much outrage and passion as possible regarding whether or not your city is on this list in the comments!

Oddly, Provincetown — widely hailed as like the best gay place ever — doesn’t even rank on the top 500 for cities populated by Autostraddlers. What’s up with that? We don’t know, maybe it’s because only 3,000 people actually live there, according to Wikipedia. Anyhow, we encourage you to visit Provincetown!

Clearly, not every city is on this list, but while putting it together we found ourselves super-disappointed by the resources out there for lesbians looking to live places. So, we’re actively recruiting YOUR Queer Girl City Guides. These can be for any city in the world, including the ones on this list.

Email Laneia [at] Autostraddle dot com with a letter describing your connection to the city you wanna write about. She’ll let you know if it’s already been taken or not, at which point you’ll be responsible for crafting a comprehensive guide addressing things like the degree to which the LGBT scene is G vs. L, the environment for queer families, the college scene, local events/festivals, activist groups, nightlife, trans-friendliness, etc. You’ll also need to provide at least five of your own high-res photos (which you own the rights to), links to the places you talk about (and phone numbers/addresses when necessary), and whatever insidery details you’ve got.

These guides can absolutely be collaborative if you’ve got friends/family who wanna work on it with you.

Without any further ado…

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Top 21 U.S. Locations Where We’re Pretty Sure That You’re Likely to Meet Some Other Lesbians

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1. Northampton/Amherst, MA

Keywords: Smithies, Out for Reel Film Festival, Pioneer Valley Roller Derby League, Lesbianville, New England Trans United Pride March, Allison Bechdel, Rachel Maddow, Pride & Joy, Sid Vintage, Iron Horse

In Massachusetts, same-sex marriage is legal, adoption rights are LGBT-inclusive and anti-discrimination laws include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Northampton Pride Parade

Northampton‘s got more lesbians per capita than any town or city in the entire country, and that’s not even counting the transient students from Lez-Heaven Smith College or Mount Holyoke in nearby South Hadley. There are 40.31 same-sex couples per 1,000 households here. The birthplace of Rachel Maddow’s career, this cozy politically progressive college town is home to its own lesbian dance club (Diva’s), LGBT bookstore, LGBT newspaper and a sweet LGBT film series, Out For Reel. Amherst ensconces  U-Mass, Lezzified Hippie Festival of Education Hampshire College and, obviously, Amherst. Vegan restaurants abound. Plus, it’s Massachusetts which means same-sex marriage is legal.

Meet local-like minded ladies in the Western Masstraddle meet-up group.

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2. New York, NY

Keywords: Ginger’s, Nation, Choice Cunts, Stonewall, GO! Magazine, Autostraddle, Eileen Myles, Dyke Slope, Cattyshack, Cubbyhole, Newfest, Logo, Women’s Herstory Archives, Rodeo Disco, Ali Forney Center, The Center, Henrietta Hudson

In New York, same-sex marriage is legal and adoption rights are LGBT-inclusive. Employment anti-discrimination laws protect people on the basis of sexual orientation but do not include gender identity protections.

Dykes on Bi-Cycles with The PoleRiders at NYC Gay Pride 2010 via colorandlightphoto.com

Autostraddle got born in New York and it got born in New York for a reason — ’cause the city is chock-full of dykes. New York City’s got more gays & lesbians up inside it than any other city in the country and the diversity of the LGBTQ scene and the anonymity afforded by NYC’s masses make it a prime location for one to spread one’s newly-queer wings. Conversely, newly legalized same-sex marriage makes it a nice place to settle down. NYU, The New School, Barnard and Columbia are chock-full of lesbians, as is nearby Sarah Lawrence. There are resources/activity groups for everyone of every sexual proclivity, gender identity, political passion and yoga style preference.

Although Manhattan’s West Village and Chelsea neighborhoods have become largely male-centric spaces, lesbians have made gayborhoods of their own in areas like Park Slope, Red Hook, East Harlem and West Harlem. Nightlife is always evolving as some clubs close and new nights crop up, from Cubbyhole to Choice Cunts to Lovergirl. However everything is super fucking expensive all the time.

Meet local like-minded ladies in the NYC Straddlers and the NYC Autostraddlers groups. AS Team Members who live here include Photographer Robin, Senior Editor Jess, Writers Gaby, Katrina and Jamie, and contributors Michelle and Bevin.

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3. Los Angeles/West Hollywood, CA

Keywords: LA Gay & Lesbian Center, The L Word, The Abbey, The Real L Word, Truck Stop, Gimme Sugar, Ellen DeGeneres, Gay in LA, Silver Lake, Urth Cafe, Booby Trap, Girlbar, Ellen, Fusion: LGBT People of Color Film Festival, Hamburger Mary’s, Dyke Day LA

In California, domestic partnerships are legal and the state recognizes the status of couples who were married in states where same-sex marriage is legal. Adoption rights are LGBT-inclusive. Anti-discrimination laws include sexual orientation and gender identity.

There are lesbians that loathe the fuck out of this city and there are those that love every inch of it’s burning hot hub of lezzer lezdom and those in the latter group seem to have a pretty good time here. It never snows, there are girl parties nearly every night, and the place is teeming with creative women looking to collaborate with other strange geniuses. The city that birthed The L Word has been birthing power lesbians and stylish young dykes for generations. As the hub of the uber-liberal entertainment industry, Outfest and The LGBT People of Color Film Festival, The GLAAD Awards, The Power UP! Awards are all held here.

West Hollywood specifically has a population of about 39,000 and 1/3 of that population is LGBT, so there’s a good chance your Coffee Bean barista and/or Hamburger Mary’s waitress swings your way. Their lesbian nightlife tradition kicked off in the 1920’s with the radical bohemian glamorous lesbian parties at WeHo’s Gardens of Allah Hotel.

Also worth mentioning — Long Beach! It’s about 30 minutes from LA and is often overlooked, despite having its own thriving LGBT community. There’s Long Beach Pride, The Long Beach LGBT Center and the Long Beach Q Film Festival. Long Beach is actually 8.1% GLBs, which makes it the 10th most-LGB-populated city.

Meet local like minded ladies in the We Straddle LA, Bitch group. the city is stocked with Autostraddle Team Members, including Design Director Alex, Brandy Howard & Julie Goldman, Haviland Stillwell, Ashley Reed, Sarah Croce, Stylist Sara Medd, Contributing Editor Brittani and Contributor Chloe.

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4. San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, CA

Keywords: Harvey Milk, The Lex, Michelle Tea, The Castro, Dinah in Color, Original Plumbing, Good Vibrations, The Frameline Festival, The Advocate, Curve Magazine, The Mission, Valencia, The Lusty Lady, The Crib, Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project

In California, domestic partnerships are legal and the state recognizes the status of couples who were married in states where same-sex marriage is legal. Adoption rights are LGBT-inclusive. Anti-discrimination laws include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Cat Perez via lesbiansinsf.tumblr.com

Everybody knows that San Francisco is Queer Utopia (and especially trans-friendly) but you probably knew that even before  you saw Milk. The Bay Area is notoriously liberal and stocked with political activists, innovative writers and gender outlaws — in fact, LGBTQ culture is practically the dominant culture here, regardless of the fact that so many heterosexuals share the space. Seriously – so much queer shit to do.

However, 60% of San Francisco’s same-sex couples are men. Meanwhile, Oakland is on the up-and-up when it comes to lady-queerness.  The Gay & Lesbian Atlas, using numbers from the 2000 Census, determined Oakland had the highest concentration of lesbian couples in the entire country. It’s an affordable alternative to San Francisco with its own mixed LGBT dive bar (The White Horse), a lesbian-owned bookstore (Laurel), its own pride, its own monthly gay dance party (Hella Gay) and a Black LGBT Film Festival. Queer collegians or academics can be found at San Francisco State, University of California-Berkeley, Mills and Stanford, among others.

You can hold hands with anyone you want, just remember to recycle!

Meet local like-minded ladies in the Straddling by the Bay group. Team members living here include Editor-in-Chief Riese, Intern Bren, Writer Annika and Contributors Marni, Fitforafemme and Kelsey.

5. Cambridge/Boston/Somerville, MA

Keywords: Machine/Dyke Night, The Bay Windows, Edge Boston, Boston LGBT Film Festival,  Bisexual Resource Center, Keshet for the Jewish LGBT community, Queer Women of Color, Queer Asian Pacific-Islander Alliance, LGBT Youth Alliance, Fenway Health Center

In Massachusetts, same-sex marriage is legal, adoption rights are LGBT-inclusive and anti-discrimination laws include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Boston Dyke March photo by Kelly G on flickr – flickr.com/photos/thekellyg

In the 19th century, people used the term “Boston Marriages” to describe the middle-to-upper-class educated ladies who lived together as couples in the city after graduating from one of the city’s many Universities. Nowadays, ladies who wanna marry ladies can just do so and they can use the term “marriage.” This area has the largest lesbian community nationwide and is one place where gay ladies outnumber gay men. Cambridge is home to 41 LGBT-owned businesses, and the bounty of LGBT-friendly schools in the area are a huge draw: Simmons (all-girls), Brandeis, Harvard, Emerson and MIT.

Meet local like-minded ladies in the Autostraddle Social Club – Boston Chapter. Also, Contributing Editor Lizz lives here!

6. Chicago, IL

Keywords:  The Reeling Film Festival, Boystown, Andersonville, The Center on Halsted, The Deaf Lesbian Festival, Big Chicks, Watra Thursdays, Early 2 Bed, Towertown, Out in Chicago

In Illinois, civil unions are legal and employment non-discrimination policies are sexual orientation and gender identity inclusive.

Chicagostraddlers on New Years Eve

Chicagostraddlers are perhaps Autostraddle’s most passionate meet-up group and, along with San Francisco, Boston and New York, was one of the first cities to develop a lesbian “scene” in the post-World-War-I era. The first gay rights organization in the US was founded here in 1924.

Northwestern University is in nearby Evanston, and our LGBT College Guide Northwestern U Reviewer promises that “if you’re willing to sit through the first awkward five minutes of a Chicagostraddlers meetup, you will be rewarded with a wonderfully diverse queer posse who will accompany you to derby matches, lady arm wrestling, chicken and waffles, Pride, FKA at Big Chick’s, brunch at the Chicago Diner, and pretty much anything involving alternative lifestyle haircuts/flasks.”

7. Seattle, WA

Keywords: OutWest Bar, Lesbian Resource Center, Babeland, Dan Savage, RE-Bar, Capitol Hill, Neighbours, The Seattle Lesbian, The Stranger, Ingersoll Gender Center, The Dorian Society

In Washington, domestic partnerships and out-of-state legal same-sex marriages are recognized. Non-discrimination policies are LGBT inclusive.

The Emerald City Mudhens – Seattle Women’s Rugby Team

Seattle! Where computer software, coffee and grunge music were born! A lot of people live in Seattle and a lot of those people are lesbians — 12.9% of the city’s residents identify as LGBT. Seattle’s dedicated lesbian bar is called Wildrose, its completely-devoted-to-LGBT-film cinema is called The Three Dollar Bill Cinema (it hosts both a Transgender and a Gay & Lesbian Film Festival annually) and its Roller Derby League is called Seattle’s Rat City Rollergirls. The city’s also super trans-friendly — The Ingersoll Gender Center has been holding peer-support meeting for trans, genderqueer and otherwise gender-variant folks at least once a week since 1976.

Meet local like-minded ladies in the Seattlestraddle group.

8. Portland, OR

Keywords: Bitch Magazine, Vaseline Alley, Portlandia, Rose City Gay Freedom Band, Triangle Productions, Portland Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, Hawthorne Boulevard, Alberta, Q Center, The Milwaukee Tavern

In Oregon, same-sex couples may join in domestic partnerships and employment non-discrimination policies are LGBT inclusive.

Alex via lesbiansinpdx.tumblr.com

Portland is super queer. It’s quirky, liberal, laid back, and home to a lot of trees and mountains and bodies of water and beaches and wineries and bookstores and farmers markets. Home to AS’s Tech Editor Taylor and the 8th-most Autostraddler-populated city in the country, The Rose City is more than just the name of that sweet Portland Queer anthology Gabby has a story in. In 2008, it was the first big metropolitan city to elect a homo to be their mayor!

Meet local like-minded ladies in the Pdx Autostraddlers group.

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9. Washington DC

Keywords: The DC Center, OutWrite, Capital Trans Pride, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, GLSEN, Family Equality Council, National Equality March, Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, The Real World DC, The HRC, DC Radical Fairies, Tongues Afire, Rainbow Youth Alliance, BiNet USA, National Center for Lesbian Rights

In Washington DC, same-sex marriage is legal and non-discrimination laws are inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity.

2011 Capital Pride Parade / photo by Metro Weekly’s Julian Vankim

I feel like there are about twenty different DCs and one of them is hella gay (though nobody says “hella” there). I mean, there’s the politics and the activism, and also American, The University That Birthed Two Autostraddle Writers, Katrina and Carmen, the latter of whom describes American as “dyke paradise.”  Clearly it headquarters a lot of political activism groups and events, as well as a vibrant Gayborhood in Dupont Circle. The first-ever Dyke March happened here in 1993. [Sidenote: a 2007 DC Public School Survey of High School students found 13.2% of young women identifying as lesbian, bisexual or unsure, which is kinda a lot.]

Meet local like-minded ladies at the Baltimore / D.C. Autostraddlers group.

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10. Austin, TX

Keywords: South by Southwest, Austin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Foodies, Lipstick 24, Rusty’s, ‘Bout Time, Softball Austin, Out Youth, Allgo, Gender & Sexuality Center, Book Woman

In Texas, there is no legal recognition for same-sex couples or LGBTQ-inclusive employment non-discrimination policies. 

backstage at the Austin Kings and Things show, photographed by Alina Prax (facebook.com/kingsnthings)

Texas’s government may treat gays abysmally, but Austin is a countercultural liberal breath of fresh air best known for its indie music scene, awesome BBQ and the annual South by Southwest music/film/interactive festival. I mean, there’s a special Yoga class for Genderqueers, The Texas Gay Rodeo Association, The Kings and Things Drag King Group, and an active “e-mail based social network” called Foodies that organizes regular lay-dee get togethers. The lesbian social scene is “lively” and residents find queer life uniquely blended in to the dominant Austin culture in a super-special way.

Meet local like-minded ladies in the Austin Straddlers group.

Next: Cities 11 through 21

The Gayest US City is Salt Lake City, Says “The Advocate,” Nobody Else

Every year for the last three years, The Advocate develops a brand new set of subjective criteria with which to determine the country’s very best cities for gay people. Every year, this controversial criteria leads to incendiary results which are then debated by the entire gay internet and sometimes even the USA Today.

This year was no exception, as criteria included the number of WNBA teams, International Mr. Leather Competition semifinalists and Nude Yoga classes.

Here’s their explanation:

There’s the official census with information on same-sex couples as a percentage of the population, then there’s our accounting of the gayest places in the USA — and we know the twain shan’t meet. But do we really need another article telling us that the homos gather in West Hollywood and Hell’s Kitchen? That Northampton, Mass., is still Lesbianville, USA? (Don’t get us wrong, we love those places.) Instead, in our third annual accounting of the gayest places in America — according to our totally accurate if decidedly subjective criteria — we look at the per capita queerness of some less expected locales.

So, straight away we see that The Advocate is not actually ranking the US’s gayest cities, it’s ranking the “Per capita queerness of some less expected locales.”  The results were precisely as wacky as you’d expect from such an undertaking — but more importantly, The Advocate actually published the entire “Gayest Cities in America” article on one page, a bold move from a website that traditionally breaks its articles into 5-12 pages, which drives me batshit crazy.

Last year’s set of strange criteria resulted in Minneapolis, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh, Orlando and Las Vegas in the top five.  In 2010, Atlanta nabbed the top spot, followed by Madison, Wisconsin, Bloomington, Indiana, Iowa City and Burlington, Vermont. What happened this year?

Well, that’s next! I’m gonna give you The Advocate’s list along with rankings from a list of our own — we’ve been doing a lot of our own statistics lately and one of the more interesting results is the list of US cities with the highest populations of Autostraddle Readers.

Gayest Cities in America, according to The Advocate:

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1. Salt Lake City, Utah

Autostraddler Population Rank: #55

The Advocate says: “While those unfamiliar with the Beehive State are likely to conjure images of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, far-less-oppressive-than-it-used-to-be Salt Lake City has earned its queer cred.”

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2. Orlando, FL

Autostraddler Population Rank: #76

this is two lesbians in Disney World having a gay old time, about a year before they invented this website

The Advocate Says: “Besides hosting Gay Days at Disney World, where 50,000 LGBT folks and their kids dressed in red T-shirts invade the theme park the first Saturday in June (and spend $100 million in town), Orlando has more gay softball teams than you can shake a Louisville Slugger at.”

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3. Cambridge, MA

Autostraddler Population Rank: #14

butch lez julie goldman performs at harvard

The Advocate Says: “The home of Harvard University likes a smarty-pants, including the nation’s first African-American lesbian mayor, E. Denise Simmons.”

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4. Fort Lauderdale, FL

Autostraddler Population Rank: #151

The Advocate says: “The area is teeming with gay bars and restaurants, and a ton of guesthouses and spas that run the gamut from mild to spicy.”

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5. Seattle, WA

Autostraddler Population Rank: #7

The Advocate says: “… tons of locavore and cosmopolitan cuisine, funky bars in a robust LGBT scene, Dan Savage, and hookups.”

They also have an excellent library.

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6. Ann Arbor, MI

Autostraddler Population Rank: #22

our senior editor tweeted this yesterday

I say: This is actually where I grew up! It’s super liberal and very gay-friendly. And as The Advocate mentions, any ladies looking for a super-special evening are welcome to visit Stilleto’s nightclub in nearby Inkster. Anyhow, I wasn’t out/self-aware when I lived there, but I also graduated from University of Michigan and so did Contributing Editor Whitney Pow. So there you go.

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7. St.Paul/Minneapolis

Autostraddler Population Rank: Minneapolis is #12, St.Paul is #31

these two cuties won the right to walk together in the Royalty Court last year

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8. Knoxville, TN

Autostraddler Population Rank: #90

this is a female basketball player who popped up when i googled "lesbian knoxville"

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9. Atlanta, GA

Autostraddler Population Rank: #16

this is a famous lesbian singer/actress who grew up in Atlanta & Savannah and has a webseries on this website

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10. Grand Rapids, MI (Maybe Tony the Tiger is gay)

Autostraddler Population Rank: #69

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11. Little Rock, Arkansas

Autostraddler Population Rank: #227

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12. Portland, Oregon:

Autostraddler Population Rank: #8

this is the actual fridge of a lesbian who lives in portland and wrote about it for this website

This seems true.

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13. Austin, Texas

Autostraddler Population Rank: #10

this is a bisexual girl visiting austin, texas while writing about sxsw for this website

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14. Long Beach, CA

Autostraddler Population Rank: #64

Jenelle Hutcherson, first gay contestant for Miss Long Beach

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15. Denver, CO

Autostraddler Population Rank: #17

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So, in conclusion — according to The Advocate over the course of the last three years, more or less every city and college town in the country is gay friendly, although many studies and the American political climate suggest otherwise. What do you think of this year’s list? I feel like they’re wrong about Little Rock, but I can’t be sure.

The Divided States of Gaymerica: They Love You in Maine, Loathe You in Mississippi

Some researchers have been putting a lot of time/energy into determining where, exactly, you’re most likely to be oppressed and the results are at once totally predictable and completely shocking. It’s predictable because us homos have a chronic habit of losing when our civil rights are up for a popular vote, discrimination remains written into our constitution, and The Real L Word exists. It’s shocking because despite how far we’ve come as a country, there are many states out there where popular opinion has barely budged and seems unlikely to transform any time soon.

See, lately the National stats have kinda been floating gradually toward our favor. A recent Gallup survey showed 64% of respondents believing gay and lesbian relations should be legal, up from 50% in 2000 and 32% in 1987. Earlier this year, The Public Religion Research Institute found 47% of Americans supporting gay marriage and 47% against. Other recent studies by Gallup, ABC News and CNN placed support of gay marriage at between 51% and 53%.

But, as two other recent studies show, progress may seem far off if you live in Alabama. Yesterday’s National Coming Out Day probably felt a little different depending on where you’re at in the Nation.

gay rights activists in montgomery, alabama

First up we have an employment discrimination survey from American Journal of Sociology which focused on gay men. Researchers sent 1,700 copies of two resumes out to entry-level white collar job openings — managers, business and financial analysts, sales representatives, customer service representatives, and administrative assistants.

One resume indicated that the applicant had been part of a gay organization in college. In order to eliminate the possibility of job discrimination against gay people based on an overall aversion to liberal left-leaning politics, the other resume indicated its applicant’s involvement with the “Progressive and Socialist Alliance.”

They found that employers were 40% less likely to offer interviews to applicants with resumes that indicated they were openly gay than they were to offer interviews to their heterosexual counterparts.

However! Researchers said most of the overall gap was driven by the extreme disparities in Texas, Florida and Ohio. In California, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New York, the gaps were statistically insignificant.

It’s hard to tease out the chicken/egg situation here, but as you can see by that giant white hole down the middle of this chart from The Gay & Lesbian Task Force, there isn’t any legislation in place to stop employers in these states from discriminating against potential employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity:

But what’s the bigger picture? Well, this week The University of Chicago Press has published its evaluation of where it’s “okay to be gay.” They’ve declared that New Englanders (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) are the most accepting of gay people with only 27% of study respondents saying homosexuality is always wrong.

The remaining regions, in order of tolerance for gay people:

2. Pacific Region (Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington) – 37.5% think homosexuality is “always wrong”

3. Mid-Atlantic (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania) – 39.3%

4. West North Central Region (Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota) – 43.8%

5. East North Central Region (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin) – 46.4%

6. Mountain states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming) – 47.2%

7. South Atlantic (Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia) – 54.8%

8. West South Central (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas) – 61.8%

9. East South Central (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee) – 73.7%

Similarly, these regional attitudes are quickly apparent when you check out the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s map of partner-rights legislations across the US:

State-by-state data tells the same story of dramatic disparity over and over — whereas in Massachusetts, 60% favor gay marriage and only 30% oppose it, in West Virginia only 19% of the state’s voters want same-sex marriage legalized. When the Census’s 2005-2009 American Community Survey ranked cities by gay population, the top ten included five New England states and five in the Pacific Region.

I took perhaps an obsessive amount of time looking at these numbers along with all of the statistics in the whole wide world (including numbers from The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Gallup and Public Policy Polling) and considering my own personal, completely subjective feelings about life in these here United States (based on extensive travel, conversations with other humans, reading magazines/books, watching a lot of documentaries and taking multiple trips to Oklahoma wherein I posed as my gay best friend’s girlfriend) to break down the country as I see it.

I’ve concluded that we’ve got approximately four “types” of states right now when it comes to Gay-Friendliness (which correspond with the above regional rankings of gay tolerance): Winners, Up-and-Comers, Wild Cards, and Longshots.

Type One – Winners: States like Massachusetts, New York and Vermont, where gay people already have a healthy portion of civil rights as well as general social acceptance.

new yorkers celebrate same-sex marriage

Type Two – Up-and-Comers: States like California, Illinois and Oregon, where one expects equality will come sooner rather than later and, although pockets of religious extremism pose some threat, people over 70 are generally the ones blamed for present inequity. Due to the finite lifespan of a human being, these states have high (although morbid) hopes for the future.

protests in calfornia over prop 8

The next two categories require a bit more unpacking and a good long look at the forces driving anti-gay sentiments in these states. What do they have in common besides latitude and longitude? Well, obviously the worst states for gay people are usually the best states for the GOP.

But more importantly, it comes as no surprise that a great deal of this discrimination, unfortunately for G-d who is probably super-annoyed that everybody has forgotten to love thy neighbor, is rooted in religion — more specifically, Evangelical Churches. Believe it or not, most churches are okay with your homogayness. But not the Evangelical Protestants!

Evangelical churches are thriving in America. It’s a boom industry, actually — and for more about the growth of evangelical megachurches, I highly recommend reading The Atlantic‘s Did Christianity Cause the Crash?.

"less than 1% are in canada"

Nationally, 26% of Americans identify as Evangelical Protestants. But over 40% of citizens in Alabama, North & South Carolina, Kentucky and Mississipi are affiliated with the notoriously anti-gay movement as well as over 50% of the population in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee.

And according to the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religion Landscape Survey, whereas nationally 50% of Americans think homosexuality should be accepted by society, only 26% of Evangelical Churches’ congregants feel that way.

This is significantly less than most other American religions, surpassed in intolerance only by Jehovah’s Witnesses (17%) and Mormons (24%). (The most accepting religious faiths include Judaism, Buddhism, Catholics and “other Christians.”)

Furthermore, 79% of Evangelicals say “religion is very important in their lives,” a dedication matched only by Historically Black Churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons (faiths which only compose 7%, 1% and 2% of the US Population, respectively). And — surprise! — residents of more gay-intolerant states with the highest Evangelical populations are more likely to say “religion is very important in their lives”:

In 2009, Gallup surveyed gay/lesbian people about whether or not their city/area was a bad place to live and found only 25% of respondents in the less religious areas said their home was bad for gays, as opposed to 84% of residents in the most religious areas:

g-d does not endorse this message, loves you for who you are

Which brings me to Type Three, The Wild Cards. These are states in which extreme social conservatism and relative social liberalism exist in close quarters, states where gays are openly attacked in one town and have three bars to choose from in another. These states aren’t 47% Evangelical, like Mississippi, but many are still host to a significant Evangelical population (or that one state with all the Mormons).

In Texas (34% Evangelical), a lesbian won the mayorship in Houston, but in 2010 the Texas Republican platform pushed to make conducting a same-sex marriage a felony. Texas is home to some of the country’s most mega-megachurches, but it’s also home to booming gay villages in Houston, Dallas and the uber-liberal Austin. In March 2010, the Texas Board voted to put a conservative stamp on their history and economics textbooks (that means no gays or evolution), but recent polling shows that 59% of Texans believe that same-sex couples should at least be allowed to form civil unions with the same rights as marriage.

Texas's Governor Rick Perry and Houston's Mayor Annise Parker

The Advocate‘s totally weird and non-scientific ranking of the gayest cities in 2010 listed  several cities from states I’d consider Wild Cards, including Albuquerque, New Mexico (#15) Asheville, North Carolina (#12), and Gainesville (#11) and Fort Lauderdale (#7) in Florida. Atlanta, Georgia scored #1.

There are pockets of hope in states broadly believed to be anti-gay — last week, the Public Policy Polling Center found opposition to same-sex marriage in Florida has fallen from 53% wanting same-sex marriage to be illegal in June to 48% opposing it right now. But Florida also expressly prohibits “homosexual” couples from adopting children. [ETA: Apparently this ban has been overturned since the GLTF’s last update in April 2011. So hurrah!] Nevada has employment protection and domestic partnerships for gay people and a booming gay population, but is one of many states with a same-sex marriage ban on the books.

In a Wild Card state, a gay human can usually find a tolerant place to live, even if the state in general isn’t exactly waiting with open arms. Some of these states may trend our way soon (Michigan) and some probably won’t for a long time (Texas). (I grew up in Ann Arbor, a liberal mecca in Michigan, and my gay mom still lives in a gay-friendly area of Suburban Detroit.)

Then we’ve got the Longshots –– like Mississippi (47% Evangelical), Alabama (49%), Tennessee (51%), Arkansas (53%), Oklahoma (53%) and Kentucky (49%). Tennessee’s Senate recently passed the infamous “don’t say gay” bill. A 2011 Public Policy survey found 46% of Mississippi Republicans oppose interracial marriage. So what do we do with these numbers?

Constance McMillen goes to court in Jackson, Mississippi

For starters, this is why we need action on the federal level. Obama keeps saying it’s a matter best left to the states, but tell that to a 19-year-old in Alabama who can’t afford to move out of state but wants equal rights. The aforementioned states are also some of the poorest states in the country with respect to household income — Mississipi ranks 50th as the poorest US state, followed up by Arkansas at 48th, Kentucky at 47th, Alabama at 46th, Oklahoma at 45th and Tennessee at 44th. In other words, these are the people for whom Dan Savage’s It Gets Better video about his life in San Francisco is more a slap in the face than a comforting tome.

But do these numbers really tell the whole story? Cities like Birmingham, Alabama, are allegedly super-gay. When a university in Nashville fired a lesbian soccer coach, basically the entire city freaked out about it, and in Arkansas a school administrator was recently forced to resign over anti-gay rants on facebook. Mary Gray, author of Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America, told us that while doing research for her book, said she found that “the idea that everyone is going to be a hater” was inaccurate. Furthermore: “More often than not I found folks were either neutral or positive, and just didn’t have the forum to say they were absolutely fine with LGBT identifying people.”

We talk a lot about how despite the degree to which it often sucks to be gay in America, it sucks even more to be gay in lots of other countries (for example, Uganda!). But it’s important to remember that things still suck really really really super bad for gay people right here in America, too, possibly sucking worse than you could ever imagine if you are right now sitting in Bed-Stuy eating macaroni con queso on your fire escape wishing you could get a job and/or girlfriend or if you’re sitting in Northampton feeding your baby applesauce.

San Francisco, CA

(Furthermore, one could easily write another 2,000 words on the intersectionality of oppression for LGBTQs in these states who are also of color and/or poor and/or trans.)

For those of you who do live in the more intolerant states, are the numbers misleading or spot on? For all of us — what does this mean for the future of the gay rights movement in America? There’s a long tradition in America of people who feel like “outsiders” — artists, geeks, atheists — leaving homogeneous towns for more embracing futures (a possibility that’s been significantly dimmed during economic recessions.) But is it fair to expect immutably gay people to follow the same paths? (I’ve never known as many Texans as I did while attending my boarding school for the arts in Michigan.) Do we focus on helping the tireless activists fighting for their civil rights in The Bible Belt — who have made significant, triumphant progress over the years — or do we focus on helping people relocate altogether? Or is there another angle altogether we should be looking at?

Gay People Suddenly Everywhere According To Census Data

The US Census only occurs every 10 years; respondents have only been able to report whether they’re living with a same-sex partner since 1990. Aside from the principle of the thing, that gay families can now confirm that they exist in much the same way straight ones can, it also means that there’s some interesting new data that for the first time, we have enough points to (sort of) analyze.

For instance, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles, the numbers of gay couples total has “jumped by half in the past decade, to 901,997.” (The Census doesn’t ask about sexual orientation, only about the partner you live with, so it can only measure same-sex couples as opposed to queer people.) Why the huge uptick? Assuming that the number of people who identify as not straight has stayed pretty constant — which is a tricky thing that depends on whether you count people who are out to themselves and to others — does that mean that suddenly everyone is a lot better at finding girlfriends? Is this about OKCupid?

DOG NOT INCLUDED ON CENSUS

The Wall Street Journal has more surprising numbers; the number of reported gay couples has actually skyrocketed in the parts of the country that people generally expect to see them least, what the WSJ tactfully refers to as “farther away from the coasts.”  “The number of self-identified gay couples rose by nearly 90% in Montana, Nevada and West Virginia, for instance, while California, New York and Washington, D.C., saw increases of 40% or less, according to [the Williams Institute’s Gary Gates’s] analysis of the data.” He also has some insight as to why this might be, barring the chance that everyone suddenly got a lot prettier and better at baking muffins:

The increase is too big to be explained by a sudden jump in coupling among gay people, said Gary Gates, a scholar at the Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, a think tank on sexual-orientation policy. Instead, he said, same-sex couples appear to be more willing to describe themselves as such, including in states farther away from the coasts.

Data from things like the Census is always interesting, because it’s self-reported; it ends up being less about the way things actually are in the world and more of an analysis of what people describe the world as being like, and why they choose to do it that way. If we go with Mr. Gates’ theory, the big takeaway is that we’re seeing a dramatic increase in gay people who are willing to self-identify as gay people in gay relationships, even on government documentation. A moving example is that of Michael Davis, who the NYT profiles as someone who might have answered the Census honestly in regards to their partner for the first time recently.

A decade is a long time in the gay community, and couples who were part of the pre-boomer generation said it had been all but impossible for them to come out. Michael Davis, 69, a retired intelligence officer who moved to Rehoboth in 2004, grew up in a small town in Wyoming in the 1950s, where homosexuality, in his words, did not exist.“When I was growing up, gay was a mood you were in,” he said, sitting at dinner with his partner, George Hooper, 64, a retired federal employee. For years he told people he was renting a room to Mr. Hooper. He could be fired for coming out in his job.

GRAPHIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

The census data showing huge increases of gay couples and families in places of the country that some think of only as areas where closeted gay cowboys are ultimately murdered and then mourned in really tearjerking scenes may also indicate more than just that people are more comfortable being honest there. The geographical surprises in the gay Census data may reveal a pattern of gay people and families moving to more rural and middle-of-the-country areas, away from the urban centers typically thought of as their arena. This seems to be partially because the baby boomers, one of the first generations where a large percentage of its gay people could live openly, are starting to retire. Either way, retirement or no, the message seems to be clear that places that were never considered safe or enjoyable to live in as an out gay person are suddenly okay, and not everyone actually wants to live in Park Slope.

Nona Willis Aronowitz at GOOD puts it like this:

There’s been some debate as to whether these numbers are accurate, as there’s no way of knowing whether or not people are “coming out” on Census applications. Still, this trend is good news for gays and lesbians. It means that the country is becoming more tolerant, and that the threat of violence and discrimination is slowly dissipating. A majority of Americansnow think same-sex couples should be accepted into society, and about half of them are in favor of gay marriage. As Slate points out, it may be more difficult for single LGBT people to live in more far-flung locales, because it’s harder to find a support system or a date, but same-sex couples are increasingly assimilating in all kinds of settings.

 In short, in a long-term collective geographical sense, it’s getting better. Middle America is safer and more welcoming for gay people than ever before, which is good, because it’s most of America. And while any real scientist will tell you that 2-3 data points is a terrible basis for anything, so far the trend is upward as far as gay couples feeling more secure in being open about their families, and feeling good about living away from the traditional gay urban centers like New York and San Francisco. This is a good thing on its own, and also makes things better in turn; studies and polls have clearly demonstrated that knowing an out gay person in your real life, even if it’s just the grocery store cashier, correlates with being much, much more likely to support gay causes in general, and with that person then going forth to help make a generally more gay-friendly community.  So it’s great news that smaller towns in Montana, Nevada, West Virginia and elsewhere now feel like safe places to live; it’s even better news that the people who live there are making them even safer. It looks like soon you won’t be able to throw a stick anywhere in America without hitting someone gay; and soon, maybe no one will want to.

Americans Believe 25% of Population is Gay, Weren’t Born That Way

New statistics from Gallup reveal that Americans believe one in four people are gay and lesbian. 35% think more than one in four people are riding the train to homo-ville and 52% of our fine American citizenry think that at least one in five Americans are gay. Wow! MATH!

At first glance this seems promising — they’re recognizing our existence! But honestly this makes the consistent denial of our civil rights even more perplexing — do our fellow Americans actually think the gay agenda has been THAT successful? Do they think we’re everywhere and we have each other and so we don’t need equal rights? Do they think we’re legitimately taking over the world and therefore they must stop us before we steal all the children and dress them in gender neutral clothing and chant Heather Has Two Mommies into their earholes as they sleep? The most recent “credible study” on the actual homogay population shows about 3.5% of the population is gay, which is significantly less than the 10% figure we’ve been using since we saw Kinsey in 2005 and way less than these estimates.

Gallup says:

“Americans perceive that there is a large U.S. gay population — one far larger than is likely reality. Perhaps more informative than the exact figure Americans give is the trend that more Americans now than in 2002 feel they have enough information offer an estimate. This suggests Americans have had even more exposure to gays and lesbians, be it in their personal lives or through entertainment or other means.”

Also, Americans are just generally shitty at guestimating:

Gallup previously found that a majority of Americans personally know someone who is gay or lesbian, though Gallup did not ask Americans how many gay or lesbian individuals they know, or whether they know more individuals now than they did before. Additionally, Americans tend to have difficulty estimating percentages of population groups whose numbers are more widely known. Gallup a decade ago found Americans estimating much larger U.S. black and Hispanic populations than what the U.S. Census Bureau reported for those groups.

However only 40% of Americans think gay people were born that way. 42% blame upbringing and environment! Unsurprisingly, those who think people are born gay are more likely to support gay rights:

Gallup says:

A statistical analysis of the data reveals that Americans’ beliefs about the origins of same-sex orientation are much more strongly related to their views of the legality and morality of gay or lesbian relations than to party identification, ideology, religious commitment, age, and other demographic characteristics, taking all those factors into account simultaneously.

But support of gay rights is at an all-time high! +

Of all these statistics the one that’s most compelling to me is that young people overestimate the gay population. Yeah, it’s easy enough to conclude that like “less educated people,” young people just are stupid and wrong, but maybe that’s not the only reason — hopefully they’re also seeing something very different in their peer groups than prior generations. It’s been socially unacceptable to be a homo for so long that many homos chose to stay in the closet or repress their true selves, but as homosexuality edges its way into the national conversation and the internet connects more and more people to other homos, more and more people feel comfortable coming out. Furthermore, at least where women are concerned, discovering their latent homosexuality is coming quicker than it has in prior generations. See — when men don’t respond sexually to women, they’re quickly pegged as “gay.” But when women don’t respond sexually to men, they’re just pegged as — you know — women! Women aren’t socialized to expect sex to be pleasurable, often turning to Cosmo articles and special lotions rather than considering they’re maybe sleeping with the wrong gender! More gays for everyone!

Statistics will change not because there are more gay people, but because there are more OUT gay people.

Also:

This is what Gallup thinks:

Americans are now as accepting of gays and lesbians as at any point in the last three decades, if not in U.S. history. This greater acceptance extends to their views of the morality of gay and lesbian relations, of their legality, and of whether marriage should legally be granted to same-sex couples.

If the trends continue and political leaders are responsive to public opinion on the issue, one would expect more states and the federal government to expand the legal rights of gays and lesbians, including the right to legally marry.

Do these statistics surprise you? Can you believe that 42% of Americans thinks it’s your mom’s fault that you’re gay? That blows my mind.

Top Cities for Gay Couples Are in States That Are Nice to Gay People, Who Knew?

This November the U.S Census Bureau will have a much easier time counting the gays then they’ve had for the last ten years because the 2010 census is the first which will count same-sex couples as same-sex couples and now that gay marriage is legal in five states it will be infinitely easier to count those people. Back in 2000, however, a lot of couples were already reporting themselves as spouses despite not being married according to the government’s definition.

However data from the Census’ 2005-2009 American Community Survey  has been analyzed and has discovered the following — the top ten cities by proportion of same-sex couples, as “identified by the percentage of households occupied by unmarried partners of the same sex”:

1. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, Calif. 1.36%
2. Burlington-South Burlington, Vt. 1.12%
3. Barnstable Town, Mass. 1.10%
4. Portland-South Portland-Biddeford, Maine 1.09%
5. Santa Rosa-Petaluma, Calif. 1.03%
6. Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Ore.-Wash. 1.00%
7. Santa Cruz-Watsonville, Calif. 0.95%
8. Springfield, Mass. 0.92%
9. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash. 0.91%
10. Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, Mass.-N.H. 0.91%

What is interesting about this list is that all of the cities are in states that currently allow same-sex marriage or domestic partnerships. However, only Massachusetts and Maine allowed either for all of the given time period, while the rest started after the data gathering began. According to USNews:

“The data suggests that a large proportion of same-sex couples in a city, state, or region is a factor that sets the stage for legislation granting marriage rights to non-heterosexual couples.”

Obviously this makes sense, since the more gay people there are in an area, the greater chance there is of them being able to get things like “rights” and “equality.” But the interesting part is that the public sentiment in support of the gay community likely existed before any policy-based action happened.

in massachusetts gay couples are happy

According to a representative from the Human Rights Campaign,

“It is more likely, if you have an organized and active LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] community, that you’re going to see relationship recognition happen. This climate would have to come together before the political process.”

In other words, people didn’t move to those cities because same-sex partnerships were OK. Same-sex partnerships moved to those cities because gay people were OK. The HRC also says:

“One of the largest factors is really about perception, and how a place is perceived to be welcoming or not.”

It’s also important to note that while the list is new, the data it’s based on is dated, and incomplete — while many gay couples listed themselves as spouses in the 2000 Census, same-sex partnership wasn’t recognized anywhere yet, making the results partial at best.

While the inclusivity of the 2010 Census is an improvement, there are still endless problems — for instance, information on sexual orientation of individuals is not recorded — which is what makes getting an estimate of the gay population so difficult and results so riddled with problems. This is what was behind the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force’s pink stickers last year which hopefully you all filled out.

Finally, because I am Canadian and haven’t had to fill out a census yet and Did Not Know This, there were only five questions on the 2010 Census anyway (age, sex, race/ethnicity, relationship, and living situation/rent/own a home), and changing them takes years of development and advocacy.

According to Queer the Census, change, when it does happen, will be important:

And until that information is gathered in a way that’s full and complete and includes individuals as well as married partners and domestic partners and people just living together to see how it feels and everyone, we’re stuck with dated top 10 lists.

There are lots of elements of the fight for marriage equality that we feel we can control — changing the hearts and minds of the citizens through information campaigns, calling voters, going door to door, talking to our friends/family, exposing lies on the other side, taking legislative action and writing articles on The Huffington Post. But if the number of gay people residing in your state is one of the most influential aspects in how that vote turns out — well, we have much less control over that. (Clearly a gay population can’t necessarily make/break a vote, but people who know gay people are more likely to be pro-equal rights, etc., so the more gay people there are to know, the better.) And here we come back tot he problems of having a majority vote on the rights of the minority, especially when the minority is really really small.

It seems like an obvious statistic now that it’s out there — what do you think? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? How is the gay community mobilized where you live?

The Trouble With Counting The Gays

Last week, Carolyn reported on a new study from UCLA that claims that 3.5% is the new 10%:

Nine million people in the U.S. identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans, according to a UCLA study released Thursday. This translates to 3.5% of the population as lesbian, gay, or bi and 0.3% as trans. An additional 8.2% have participated in same-sex sexual activity, and 11% acknowledge some same-sex attraction but do not identify as anything.

She pointed out some of the study’s flaws and highlighted some of the negative attention it’s drawing from both LGBT groups and all-around party people like the American Family Association, sharing delightful views like, “Homosexuals represent just 1.7% of populace. Time to stop getting pushed around by such a tiny minority.”

As commenter Gregory McDaniel pointed out, “Since the percentage of the population identifying as gay is so small, the right wing should just relax and say, “giving rights and respect to this small number of people can’t hurt anything”

Since lots of you had criticisms to add to Carolyn’s,  I thought it might be worthwhile to look at what’s going on here from a sociological* standpoint (as this is apparently my thing).

First off, surveys are an inherently authoritarian method of inquiry. By giving people a set of answers to choose from, they say , “I already know something, I just want you to tell me that I know what I know.” Maybe you’ve taken a sexual health survey and been asked if you use condoms and thought, “I don’t know how to answer this.” Because maybe you’ve never had sex before. Or you’re a women who has sex with women. Or you’re in a monogamous relationship. Or you’re trying to have a baby. They’re using condom use as an indicator of safe sex practices when your reality is entirely different.

In her rundown of problems, Carolyn asked if people are “identified by their self-identity, by past sexual behaviour, by sexual attraction, or by some combination of these things,” pointing out that “Sometimes these things are related and sometimes they aren’t and making generalizations is counter-productive. Labeling someone else causes everyone problems.”

This is one of the big issues with studying identities. For every genderqueer warrior, there’s a women who deeply believes that she was created to bake the perfect roasted ham for her eight kids. Social science operates on the idea that no one experience is more valid than another. There’s plenty of room in good social science for a person to say that they weren’t born gay. Or that being a man who has sex with men doesn’t make them anything other than straight.

The problem is that [shockingly] academia and the rest of the world haven’t always run hand & hand. The rest of the world consumes academic research in a myriad of ways, from a Yahoo! News headline to The Rachel Maddow Show to political propaganda and deceptive PSAs.

For example — perhaps you’ve heard of the “culture of poverty” and recognize it as a racist, classist myth that was spread to cut back on government assistance programs. The thing is that Oscar Lewis, the author of the study, was horrified to see what was done with his work. He published the research with the intent that it would be used to help fight poverty but instead it was snapped up by politicians who used it to point fingers at poor people and say, “See! You’re doing this to yourselves!” This is the ugly side of research. You never know who’s going to appropriate your data and use it for their own ugly ends.

So in this case — acknowledging that there’s more than one way to be queer has the potential to open up a Pandora’s Box of problem, though. It leaves room for fluidity that proponents of conversion therapy and other psychos might exploit.

But let’s give people the benefit of the doubt. Let’s focus on the idea that we’re all humans with brains and we shouldn’t always have to worry about appealing to the lowest common denominator. Especially when they’re going around making up numbers for themselves.

Good, reliable data is a useful thing to have in your corner when you’re looking to make change. Dr. Gates, the researcher who published the new study, said he “would like to see questions about sexuality become standard on big government surveys such as the census so that the information can be linked to health, income and other factors, just as demographers can currently study race and gender.”

And he’s got an excellent point. Whereas the gay population number is causing us some issues, tracking these things opens up a new avenue to evaluate intersectionality. By doing research that shows correlations between sexuality and earnings or health, patterns of inequality begin to emerge and are harder to write off. While all this goes back to the problem of self-identification, ask any sociologist and they’ll tell you that gender and race are just as much social constructs as sexuality and we ask about them all the time. So let people call themselves what they want to. There are too many people in the closet to get a reliable tally but maybe by doing research, proposing legislation, and changing the way people feel about what it means to be gay, we’ll get gradually closer to a real number. Just remember what commenter Chandra said, “It doesn’t matter if it’s 10% or 0.001%. Human rights aren’t dependent on how you do your math.”

*Caveat: Oh hello, I’m about a month away from graduating with my bachelor’s degree but that really doesn’t mean anything since there are gaps big enough for an elephant to fall through in in my school’s curriculum. My entire class just found out last week that functionalism is not a thing. Apparently it was laughed out of the discipline 40 years ago? Anyway.

How Many Gay People Are Out There in the Big Wide World?

Nine million people in the U.S. identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans, according to a UCLA study released Thursday. This translates to 3.5% of the population as lesbian, gay, or bi and 0.3% as trans. An additional 8.2% have participated in same-sex sexual activity, and 11% acknowledge some same-sex attraction but do not identify as anything.

The stat that has been widely cited, especially because it’s used in this Associated Press article, is 1.7% — the percentage of the total population that identifies as either lesbian or gay, before including the 1.8% who identify as bi.

Right-wing anti-gay organizations are, predictably, very excited about that number, since it is lower than the commonly referenced 10% first cited by Kinsey. Bryan Fischer, from the American Family Association, wrote, “Homosexuals represent just 1.7% of populace. Time to stop getting pushed around by such a tiny minority.”

In an interview with AP, Peter Sprigg, from the Family Research Council, argued that the percentages, especially for bisexuality, are “somewhat of a problem for the gay political movement. It undermines the idea that being born homosexual is an immutable characteristic that can’t be changed.”

Sprigg is, of course, wrong, since bisexual is not a new way of spelling straight. And Fischer’s comment is interesting, since a lot of the American Family Association’s activities are dedicated to the idea that the “homosexual agenda” is taking over and “silencing” “believers.” But the general feeling from comments like these is that the fewer gay people there are, the less important gay issues become. Which isn’t true.

In an email interview with David Badash of the New Civil Rights Movement, study author Gary Gates said:

“I hold to a belief that, in the end, good science will be helpful to the community. The stereotype of the community as rich, white, male, and urban is nearly as pervasive as the 10% figure. The emergence of quality demographic data that includes questions about sexual orientation and gender identity has allowed us to highlight the diversity of the community in ways that we’ve just not been able to do in the past. Getting sound information about the LGBT community is dependent on the willingness of surveys to ask sexual orientation and gender identity questions (and perhaps show that only about 4% of the population identifies as LGBT). On the whole, I see that as a net positive and absolutely worth the risk.”

Gates looked at data from nine surveys within the past seven years and averaged the results (five were used to estimate sexual orientation, another two were used to estimate the trans population). One benefit of this method is that it gets around some of the problems in discussions of the gay population by embracing several different methods. However, there are so many potential problems/discrepancies that it would be nearly impossible to account for all of them. Such as:

+ Are people identified by their self-identity, by past sexual behaviour, by sexual attraction, or by some combination of these things? (Sometimes these things are related and sometimes they aren’t and making generalizations is counter-productive. Labeling someone else causes everyone problems.)

+ How is the transgender population defined? How are differences in gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation addressed? (Again: labeling someone else causes everyone problems). As the authors of the UCLA study point out, looking at some/all of these things can give a vague idea of who might fall into a researcher-defined category but still doesn’t give a full picture of individual gender identity and expression.

+ What methodology is the study using? Are responses anonymous or confidential, or face-to-face? How large is the sample size? Which questions are asked over what period of time?

+ Does the study have any obvious biases (e.g., conducted by anyone with an obvious agenda, conducted by anyone with access to a specific subject pool which might skew results, conducted via hilarious poll on the internet)? Does it have any less obvious biases, such as being uncomfortable with bisexuality, ignoring trans and/or queer folk, or asking questions in a way designed to get specific answers? What age range is represented?

+ Who actually conducted the study (scientists/social scientists/people with a similar professional background and (possibly) reputations to ruin should they screw up the results? The U.S. Census? Some chick with a laptop? Some anti-gay chick with a laptop)?

+ Do the reports about the study match up with the information actually in the study? (Here is an excellent illustration of how this happens, by xkcd.) And for that matter, does the headline of the article you’re reading about the study match up with the information in the article/study?

The result of all of these potential variables is that nearly every study that tries to put a number on the gay population seems to come up with something different. The Kinsey Report gives the frequently cited 10% for men, 2-6% for women, but other studies have said 7% for women and 8% for men (2010), or 3.6% for women and 4.1% for men (2005). The data from the Kinsey Report has been reevaluated, with different results, at least four times. And Gates argues that Kinsey never tried to make a population-based estimate anyway, and that the 10% number was primarily a political strategy, which worked, sort of, at the time, but which should be re-evaluated.

So where does this leave us now? Does the new number bother you, or not? Will you use it plus math to figure out whether you should hit on the cute barista with the hair who sometimes gives you free espresso (answer: yes)?

Download the .pdf of the study here.

Advocate Ranks Gayest US Cities , F*cks Up, Excludes NYC & LA, Upsets the Internet

The Advocate produced a list of the Top 15 Gayest Cities in America, possibly for the express purpose of pissing everybody off and therefore causing a lot of internet buzz. It seems to be working as The Advocate website is taking an extra-extra long time to load today, making their decision to place every item on the list on its own page to artificially increase page views and therefore perceived traffic particularly special.

This was the ranking system employed by The Advocate:

Using a completely unscientific — but still strangely accurate — statistical equation, The Advocate has come up with a diverse and surprising list of where gay people are living, loving, voting, and creating communities. This list demonstrates that the homosexual agenda is spreading across the 50 states — from Washington, D.C., to Vancouver, Wash. — and especially, it seems, in the heartland. Like it or not, America, LGBT is more a part of the USA than ever before.

The rankings were as follows:

1. Minneapolis, Minnesota

2. Santa Fe, New Mexico

3. Pittsburgh, PA

4. Orlando, Florida

5. Las Vegas, Nevada

6. Vancouver, Washington

7. Atlanta, GA

8. Washington DC

9. Seattle, Washington

10. St. Louis, Missouri

11. San Francisco, CA

12. Cleveland, Ohio

13. Denver, Colorado

14. Oakland, California (THIS IS WHERE I LIVE! I AM PROBABLY WHY IT IS GAY)

15. Miami, Florida

Here are some of the people who are mad:

Seattle, WA – Seattle PI:

“Minneapolis is “more gay” than Seattle. So is Santa Fe and Vancouver, Wash., according to a list from Advocate.com… Seattle, usually a top-three city on rankings regarding anything gay, came in at No. 9. To put that in perspective, Vancouver was ranked sixth — largely because that’s where Portland residents go to grow up….  [The Advocate’s ranking system] factored in profiles on gay.com, the number of openly gay public officials, lesbian bars and — is this one real? — the number of Tegan and Sara performances during the last five years.”

Philadelphia, PA – Philly Magazine:

“It seems that Philly – where you get your history straight and nightlife gay, and where Ben Franklin isn’t the least bit afraid to short pants – didn’t even make the list.

But these cities did: Denver (where oxygen is an import), Pittsburgh (Queer as Folk wasn’t even filmed there), Santa Fe (do gays genuinely like Aztec print?), Cleveland (well, they did win the 2014 Gay Games), Vancouver, Wash. (is it some kind of lesbian commune?) and Las Vegas (showgirls are not drag queens).”

Houston, TX – Houston Press:

“The Advocate, the leading national GLBT magazine, has issued a proclamation outlining the 15 gayest cities in America. Houston isn’t one of them. Yeah, yeah: lesbian mayor, Montrose, huge Pride Parade — counts for nothing, apparently. Cities that are gayer than Houston? Pittsburgh. St. Louis. Oakland. Who knew?”

Atlanta, GA – Fresh Loaf Atlanta:

“Every year, National LGBT publication The Advocate concocts a dubious formula… and uses it to compile a list of the “Gayest Cities in America.” Besides being an excuse for their writers to overuse the word “gayborhood,” The Advocate’s “Gayest Cities” list serves as a guide to gay travelers — a where’s where of friendly places — and it was a source of pride when Atlanta nabbed the top spot in 2010. Well, we made the list again this year, but all the way down at No. 7. The new gayest city? Minneapolis, Minnesota. How does gayness fluctuate that much in a year?”

New York, NY – Gawker:

“Why are people so bad at making these lists? For starters, New York City isn’t even on the list! How are you going to come up with a list of the gayest cities in American and not even have New York on it? This is where Stonewall is. We have more discarded bottles of poppers floating around in our sewers than Denver has on its shelves. Yeah, Denver is on the list.”

Atlanta, GA – Project Q Atlanta:

“Falling from No. 1 to No. 7 so quickly might be an issue if the magazine’s annual 15 Gayest Cities in America was any reflection on reality…

Let’s break it down. Atlanta is indeed “awash in burgeoning gayborhoods,” but…

– The residential Candler Park is not usually thought of as a “business district.” Maybe they meant Little 5 Points.
– It’s East Atlanta Village, not “East Atlantic Village.” Maybe they meant Atlantic Station, but probably not.
– And while Virginia Highland is in fact “tree-lined,” we don’t think that electing lesbian City Council member Anne Fauver in that area—and more importantly, representing the actual adjacent gayborhood, Midtown—is the most recent data available on Atlanta’s LGBT elected officials.”

With Fauver out since 2010, the last we checked, the only openly gay Atlanta City Council member is Alex Wan, who just got a plum appointment in his second year. And what, no mention of lesbian Fulton Commissioner Joan Garner, elected last year? Not a word on gay Atlanta State Rep. Simone Bell, the nation’s first openly gay African-American legislator who this week started her second term at the Gold Dome? Of course, the Atlanta area also boasts longtime state Rep. Karla Drenner, the first lesbian state lawmaker who’s been in office so long that she’s a senior member of the Democratic party.”

So, according to our completely non-scientific methods, the following cities were totally left off the list for no apparent reason despite their overwhelming homosexuality:

New York, NY

Los Angeles/Hollywood/Long Beach, CA

Columbus, OH

Chicago, IL

Portland, ME

Ann Arbor, MI

Boston, MA

Provincetown, MA

Sacramento, CA

Austin, TX

Portland, OR

San Diego, CA

Springfield/Northampton, MA – LESBIAN CAPITAL OF THE USA

Eugene, OR

Salt Lake City, UT

Dallas, TX

Philadelphia, PA

Asheville, NC

Burlington, VT

Iowa City, IA

Bloomington, IN

Madison, WI

But hey — you know we’ve made progress when American cities are fighting over who is the gayest. I think they mean “Gay” like “happy” though right?