Boneberg said, “If you’re somewhere else in America and you’re looking at Life magazine and you see pictures of people like you in San Francisco, you come.” San Francisco was prominently featured when Life magazine published a 1964 article titled “Homosexuality in America.” Mr. “But now they come out for the first time online, and that changes, for some people, the need to leave.” “For a generation, they all remember the moment they walked through their first gay bar,” said Paul Boneberg, executive director of the G.L.B.T.

The regional gaps in political attitudes, religion and ethnic makeup are often much wider. The share of San Francisco’s population that’s gay is only two and a half times larger than the share outside major metro areas. It’s a reflection in part of increasing tolerance and of social connections made possible by the Internet.įrank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup, notes that the regional variation in sexual orientation and identity is much smaller than the variation in many other categories. And even the parts of the country outside the 50 biggest metropolitan areas have a gay population (about 3 percent) not so different from some big metropolitan areas. Nationwide, Gallup says, 3.6 percent of adults consider themselves gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Gay America, rather than being confined to a few places, spreads across every major region of the country. Significant as these differences are, the similarities are just as notable.

The least gay urban areas are in the Midwest and South. On the other hand, some of the East Coast places with famous gay neighborhoods, including in New York, Miami and Washington, have a smaller percentage of their population who identify as gay - roughly average for a big metropolitan area. How could Salt Lake be there, given its well-known social conservatism? It seems to be a kind of regional capital of gay life, attracting people from other parts of Utah and the Mormon West. Among the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Denver and Salt Lake City are also in the top 10.

The Gallup analysis finds the largest concentrations in the West - and not just in the expected places like San Francisco and Portland, Ore. As a result, there has long been a shroud of uncertainty around the geography of gay and lesbian Americans.Ī new analysis of Gallup survey data offers the most detailed estimates yet about where people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender live. But there is one glaring demographic omission: The census does not ask people about their sexual orientation. The Census Bureau asks Americans about subjects as varied as race, age, annual income and even their source of home heating.

The Queer South by Douglas Ray