What’s up with that? We don’t know, maybe it’s because only 3,000 people actually live there, according to Wikipedia. Oddly, Provincetown - widely hailed as like the best gay place ever - doesn’t even rank on the top 500 for cities populated by Autostraddlers. 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! Resources Included: The US Census, Girlports, Wikipedia, The Williams Institute, GO! Magazine, Federation of Ideas 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! 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. We used Lambda Legal as a reference for this section. 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 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).
Both rankings (unweighted & weighted) were factored into each city’s score. This ended up highly favoring smaller towns and college towns, which is unfair, just like life itself. 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. The totally unscientific possibly dubious math breaks down as follows:īased on numbers from Google Analytics, we looked at which cities/towns most Autostraddlers come from. This might be slightly more accurate than that. The Advocate‘s criteria this year included things like Veronicas concerts and Nude Yoga classes and somehow Grand Rapids made the Top Ten. 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?Ī 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%.