These Are Not The Gayest Cities in America
Not in this order, at least. In a sorta-sociological article on The Daily Beast today, Richard Florida documents what he believes to be the the 20 gayest cities in the country. Are his conclusions correct? Eh, not really.
As Choire Sicha points out on /b/'s next target, The Awl, Florida is using a strange metric. He's going by number of same-sex couples living together. This measures the number of settled gays and lesbians, but does that really make a city gay? Shouldn't the gayest cities be the ones that feel the most culturally queer? Florida's number one and probably everyone's number one is San Francisco, duhhh, but number two is Petaluma? The New York metro area is number eleven? Florida, no.
Where are Atlanta and New Orleans, the gay capitals of the south? Why is Miami number 20 instead of, uh, like number three? Why are we even bothering to measure such an unmeasurable thing? Maybe determining this all by number of domestic couples is a (noble) attempt to normalize and mainstream the whole gay thing. Who knows. We just know that Florida's list is all off.
Now we're curious. How gay is your city? New York City is pretty durn gay, though that might just be the circles we run in. Places we don't go, like Murray Hill? Not at all gay. So, y'know, it can all be pretty relative! Where do you live? Is it overrun with gayness, or blessedly normy?
