Top 20 Best Gay Cities…Big and Small
New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Washington, D.C., Boston, San Diego, Denver, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, all make the list of the 20 gayest metros.
But so do Dallas, Columbus, Ohio, Santa Rosa and Sacramento, Springfield, Massachusetts, Portland, Maine, and college towns like Eugene, Oregon, Ann Arbor, Michigan and Ithaca, New York.
The idea that most gay people live in urban enclaves like the Castro in San Francisco or Chelsea in New York City is something of a myth, Gates notes.
“Gay people live everywhere,” says Gates, “in cities, suburbs, and even in the country—one in seven same-sex couples live in rural areas.” The 2000 Census found same-sex couples living in 99 percent of U.S. counties. It’ll be interesting to see the new Census counts!
While politicians and voters continue to debate whether LGBT people have the right to marry, to adopt children, or serve openly in the U.S. military, a growing body of research suggests that considerable benefits accrue to those cities and metro areas that have sizeable, visible concentrations of gay men and lesbians. Income levels are higher, as are many other measures of life satisfaction.
It’s important that we are always counted.
“If LGBT people don’t exist in data, it’s easy for legislators and policy makers to assume they don’t exist at all.” – Whenever I am asked, I don’t care by who, if I am Married or Single, I always say, “gay and partnered”. PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW, and quit asking us stupid questions like that.
Very few demographic or economic-oriented surveys ask about sexual orientation or gender identity; sample sizes in those few that do are too small to reliably estimate the size of LGBT populations in states, metros, and cities.
Even the same-sex couple data used here presents challenges, as noted above. Our failure to gather reliable demographic data from large-scale sources has significant repercussions, Gates notes.
Read More at The Daily Beast .
