City, USA
An imperfect, numbers-based measure of America’s most LGBTQ+-friendly towns.
Can a city’s queerness be measured? People have certainly tried before, their methods ranging from lighthearted to the stolid: The Advocate’s “partly silly, partly serious list” included the number of gay bowling leagues and theaters screening Moonlight, while the Human Rights Campaign examined factors like non-discrimination laws and the practices of local law enforcement.
Our attempt falls somewhere in between. Together with Gayta Science, a website run by Maryland data scientist Kelsey Campbell that explores the LGBTQ world through numbers, we sized up 131 cities. We focused on four factors that can be scraped from the web: number of gay meetups, gay bars, therapists practiced in issues of sexuality, and the prevalence of gender neutral bathrooms. Here’s how they stack up.
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LGBTQ+ City Stats
Most Gay-Friendly Cities
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San Francisco
Washington DC
Seattle
Los Angeles
New York
Providence
Philadelphia
Bellingham
San Diego
Portland
Madison
Phoenix
New Orleans
Olympia
Atlanta
Lakeland
Chicago
Santa Rosa
Albuquerque
Modesto
Gay Bars
Gender
Neutral
Bathrooms
0.09
0.08
0.07
0.06
0.05
Lafayette, LA
Providence, RI
Baton Rouge, LA
Killeen, TX
Eugene, OR
Napa, CA
Allentown, PA
Albuquerque, NM
Huntsville, AL
Athens, GA
Cities
Meets
The percentage of Meetup.com “events” within a 10-mile radius of a city’s center on that include “gay” or “LGBT” (including variations) in the event’s topics. Notably, the cities with the most queer meetups tend not to have large cosmopolitan centers, perhaps reflecting a lack of established LGBT environments or culture, necessitating designated, impromptu spaces.
0.055
0.05
0.045
0.04
Washington DC
Philadelphia, PA
Olympia, WA
Memphis, TN
Bellingham, WA
New York, NY
Santa Fe, AZ
Cleveland, OH
Seattle, WA
Los Angeles, CA
Cities
Therapists
The percentage of therapists listed on psychologytoday.com in a city with “Gay”, “LGBT” and/or “Sexuality” in their lists of specialities. The winning cities are unsurprising, perhaps because they have a clearer market for services. As Campbell says, “Therapists might perceive liberal cities as having more potential clients looking for their services, such as affluent gays that can pay for them.”
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
San Francisco, CA
Santa Cruz, CA
Portland, OR
Seattle, WA
New York, NY
Napa, CA
Santa Rosa, CA
San Jose, CA
San Diego, CA
Asheville, NC
Cities
Gender Neutral Bathrooms
The number of businesses within a 10-mile radius of a city with bathrooms identified by Yelp users as “gender neutral” over the total number of area businesses on Yelp. In March 2017, Yelp began asking users whether the business featured a gender neutral bathroom, which it defines as “accessible to persons of any gender and [is] a locking, single-stall bathroom.”
0.06
0.04
0.02
0.00
Phoenix, AZ
Lakeland, FL
Modesto, CA
Mobile, AL
Dallas, TX
Atlanta, GA
Oklahoma CIty, OK
Harrisburg, PA
San Francisco, CA
Toledo, OH
Cities
Gay Bars
The percentage of all bars within 10-miles of a city’s center that identified as gay bars. The typical gay bar of the late 20th Century—windowless, sexually anarchic, secure from prying eyes—are an endangered species in more tolerant cities, because people no longer need a bunker. The exception is San Francisco, whose older watering holes have a firmer foothold than most.
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Anointing the queerest cities presents a curious challenge, since some of the factors seem to offset one another: The environment that fosters more “gender neutral” bathrooms is arguably the same one that has less need for LGBT meetups. So who wins? You might have guessed already.
That San Francisco continues its reign
is hardly surprising, perhaps akin to
asking which American city is the most
Cuban, or which has the most Amazon
employees. But what’s notable, as Campbell
points out, is that the results are fairly aligned with
what others, like the Human Rights Campaign, have already
found: All but six of the cities here scored 100 points on the HRC’s
Municipal Equality Index (Washington DC and Bellingham were not included). In other words, the same conclusion is interestingly reached across different sets of information, as if some objective reality manifests no matter how you look at it. Perhaps the victory is the availability of the data itself: “The fact that you can use information lying around online to come to similar results as a rigorous study is pretty cool,” she says.
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