The "Gayest" Cities in The US

Bbucko

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UCLA Law School's Williams Institute has tabulated information gleaned from the 2010 census and has posted information from all 50 states (and the District of Columbia) regarding same-sex households. It's an interesting, though flawed, approach to establishing a base-line of exactly how large the LGBT community is here in the US.

The main flaw comes not from the Williams Institute but rather from the data collected by the census itself. It's not a count of the entire LGBT population but rather only counts married/partnered couples (and their kids); this omission of single households is a pretty glaring omission, IMO. But blame the Census Bureau for that.

The second, which I know sounds picky, is that the information is presented in retardataire PDFs, which are clumsy to open and not given to cut-and-paste quotation. In 2011 there are much more user-friendly ways of employing interactive maps and charts. But that doesn't diminish the actual information like the point above.

Gawker, as always, summarizes the data in a great fashion:

According to data on same-sex couples released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the gayest city in these 50 states is, not surprisingly, Provincetown, Mass., the vacation spot of circuit boys, insane writers, and homosexuals who make a whole lot more money than any of us.

[...]

According to census data, P-Town has 163 same-sex couples per 1,000 households. For comparison, Manhattan only has 19.3 gay couples per 1,000 households. That means New York—with the fashion industry, Broadway, and Andy Cohen's nightstand drawer—is still only a tenth as gay as P-Town.

The second gayest city is Wilton Manors, Florida, outside of Ft. Lauderdale, which has 140 gay couples per 1,000 households. Next up is Palm Springs, California, with 115 gay couples per 1,000 households. It seems that most of the gays—or at least gay couples—are found in vacation destinations that attract citizens of a certain age. Apparently like monarch butterflies, we will all one day flock to the same several locations and make they brilliant with our gayness before we die.

[...]
As a resident of Wilton Manors*, I can concur that this couples-only bias gives a misleadingly-small impression of the gayness of my community, even if we're still number two in the nation. WM is hypergay :cool:; in fact, W Hollywood has only 66.7 households per 1000, so we're about twice as gay (per capita) as that notorious hotspot.

*NB: The Wikipedia page linked has not been updated in quite a while. Not only have these new statistics not been included, but the picture of City Hall shows the former building. The current building is much more impressive.

So where does your state/community come out (yucky pun intended)?
 
D

deleted3782

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So where does your state/community come out (yucky pun intended)?

My state has 7 same-sex couples per 1000 households, but in my home community I am the only gay in the village.
 

Bbucko

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I lived in West Hollywood for about a decade and I'm here to say that it's waaaaay gayer than any town outside Ft Lauderdale Fl.

Three things:

1) Technically Wilton Manors isn't "outside" of FtL. In fact, it's a separate municipality embedded into the larger city. The municipal lines here are very strange, FtL, Wilton Manors, Oakland Park and Lauderdale-By-The-Sea really are one large city from every perspective except a municipal one.

2) Though it will never have the cache nor glamour of WeHo (in fact, physically it's a rather typical scruffy Florida town near the beach), statistics don't lie. It is absolutely a fact that, with a 2000 population of 34,399 WeHo's got three times the population of WM (11,642), so I'm sure that the sheer volume of extra people make it seem much gayer. WM's population is also decidedly older, making it somewhat more likely to be partnered than WeHo's.

3) This goes back to my main issue with the Census Bureau's methodology of only counting couples; it's an extremely odd way of counting a demographic which is, by its very nature, much more likely to be single than partnered. This is especially true in urban "villages", and ultimately WeHo's much more urban than WM (there are no sidewalks on my block, for instance, though there are no single family houses, either). Though they're both suburban compared to Chelsea or Boston's South End.