Gay Cities

[+ Charlie]

I am devastated that The Advocate did not include Palm Springs in its list of gay cities this year. Apparently the facts that 40% of the population is usually claimed to be gay, the mayor and a majority of city council are openly gay, there are innumerable gay resorts and other businesses operating in the city, and the biggest event in the economic life of the city is the annual White Party, just don't matter. And they totally ignored the annual Hooville Weekend!

[MsGuy]

Rank Ageism on the part of the Advocate.

 

C'mon guys,

Loud and proud:

 

We're Gay,

We're gray,

We're here to stay!

[Cooper]

Advocate's List

 

Charlie, Don't feel bad, not one city in NY made that list either... And here I thought I was making progress with all those strip club reviews. So, what cities made this year's list...

 

1. Atlanta

2. Burlington, Vt

3. Iowa City

4. Bloomington, Ind

5. Madison, Wis

6. New Orleans

7. Ft. Lauderdale

8. Portland, Maine

9. Austin

10. Seattle

11. Gainsville, Fla

12. Asheville, NC

13. Springfield, Mass

14. San Diego

15. Alburquerque, NM

 

http://www.advocate.com/Print_Issue/Travel/Gayest_Cities_in_America/

[+ glutes]

I will bet you dollars to doughnuts Bloomington Indiana having anything approaching the Folsom Street Faire!

[Guest ryan2552]

Charlie, Don't feel bad, not one city in NY made that list either... And here I thought I was making progress with all those strip club reviews. So, what cities made this year's list...

 

1. Atlanta

2. Burlington, Vt

3. Iowa City

4. Bloomington, Ind

5. Madison, Wis

6. New Orleans

7. Ft. Lauderdale

8. Portland, Maine

9. Austin

10. Seattle

11. Gainsville, Fla

12. Asheville, NC

13. Springfield, Mass

14. San Diego

15. Alburquerque, NM

 

http://www.advocate.com/Print_Issue/Travel/Gayest_Cities_in_America/

 

What a odd list. I know a few things about Gainsville and to call it a gay city just wouldn't even be in my top 100. Same with Austin, Albuquerque and Asheville. I do not know enough about the other places to comment.

 

I agree with Charlie how could the Advocate pass up a city that hosts the Hooville get-together? Can it get any gayer than that?

[+ Axiom2001]

This is some list, and I question how these particular cities made the list as qualifying as being "gay cities!"

[+ Lucky]

Durability

 

Perhaps the folks at the Advocate were having some fun in its last days as a stand-alone magazine. Now the Advocate is merely an insert to Out magazine, and, over time, it will probably disappear altogether. The Hooville Weekend in Palm Springs will probably continue for decades after I am gone.

After all, there will always be men interested in a weekend party with escorts and those who love them!

[rvwnsd]

I live in San Diego and was shocked that it made the list. Aside from a council district that is on its 3rd gay councilperson, we have a vibrant LGBT Center and that's about it. I was surprised that Chicago wasn't on the list. The city has poured millions of dollars into the various gay enclaves, it is home to several of the HRC's best companies to work for, and just built a huge LGBT center. But, San Francisco didn't make the list. That should tell you something.

[AdamSmith]

Perhaps the folks at the Advocate were having some fun in its last days as a stand-alone magazine.

 

The inclusion of Springfield, Massachusetts would seem to confirm that. Talk about A Homo at the End of the World. With all respect to those here who, we know, love that place!

 

Now, Northampton! ...For girrrls, anyway.

[JoeyBryant]

Who makes these lists?

 

Gainsville, Fl as a gay city? How and why is that over Orlando...home of gay Disney? There's not even a trade scene out there as big as Orlando.

 

I still haven't been to Austin yet, but hear it is really popular place. Going to be checking it out in a week or 2. But it looks a bit small compared to Dallas, so unsure how that happened. But IMO, Dallas isn't really gay friendly once you leave Oaklawn and Uptown...Where 99.9% of the bars are. The gravitational pull of it's twin city, Fort Worth; tends to spill over into other areas of the metroplex.

 

Having lived in Miami/Lauderdale, I was used to having 2 options to go clubbing at. I just didn't have that option in DFW.

 

Charlie, Don't feel bad, not one city in NY made that list either... And here I thought I was making progress with all those strip club reviews. So, what cities made this year's list...

 

1. Atlanta

2. Burlington, Vt

3. Iowa City

4. Bloomington, Ind

5. Madison, Wis

6. New Orleans

7. Ft. Lauderdale

8. Portland, Maine

9. Austin

10. Seattle

11. Gainsville, Fla

12. Asheville, NC

13. Springfield, Mass

14. San Diego

15. Alburquerque, NM

 

http://www.advocate.com/Print_Issue/Travel/Gayest_Cities_in_America/

[+ Lucky]

Joey, as a brief aside, I like that you have one link that brings us to your current info. Not to criticize anyone else, I do note that some escort's posts contain signatures that go on for days with all sorts of links. When one sees them over and over, well...

[JoeyBryant]

LOL, well itss a bit easier for me to use the one I have up so I don't have to update more than one. Men4rent is pretty good at having everything on one page, including reviews and travel cities.

 

Joey, as a brief aside, I like that you have one link that brings us to your current info. Not to criticize anyone else, I do note that some escort's posts contain signatures that go on for days with all sorts of links. When one sees them over and over, well...

[+ glutes]

Advocate Gay Cities 2011

 

http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/06/28/ba-pride29_038_k_0500317000_part4.jpg

 

Avid followers of City Insider know we love to see how San Francisco stacks up against other cities in meaningless compilations of random statistics. But sometimes we have to call out these list compilers for being just, well, wrong.

 

Take The Advocate magazine and its new list, "Gayest Cities in America." Where would you expect to find San Francisco? We suspect it's not at No. 11 sandwiched between St. Louis and Cleveland.

 

But that's indeed where San Francisco - described as "the gay daddy of American cities" and "gentrifying, but still scrappy" - winds up. The gayest city of all? Minneapolis. Yes, Minneapolis. Followed by Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Orlando and Pittsburgh.

 

 

 

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry_id=81154#ixzz1C0438UUZ

[Poolboy21409]

Portland Maine!! - ever try to fuck a lobster....or want to??

[raulgmanzo]

The methodology used in the rankings of these "best of" articles is usually a combination of sloppy, stupid and bizarre. Sloppy is the way they, for example, count the number of "Lesbian bars". Stupid like why would one expect a simple linear AND POSITIVE correlation between the number of gay.com profiles and gayness? Bizzare that a journalist and his editor would both think the number of occurences of the word gay in the yellow pages was very meaningul.

In cities like S.F. or much of Chicago, or NYC, one simply doesn't need "gay" in their name or advertising, since it is often obvious, assumed, or unimportant. Hmmm might also indicate the commonplace of a surname, the name of a street or even shopping mall.

 

Just as odd as Forbes (a couple weeks ago) using the number of Walmarts to calculate the "best shopping" cities. Of course NYC fared horribly on that list. Manhattan has a great deli every couple blocks, an astounding variety of boutiques and specialty stores and Fifth avenue but mein gott, one has to shlep all the way to Secaucus for a Walmart.

 

http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/06/28/ba-pride29_038_k_0500317000_part4.jpg

 

Avid followers of City Insider know we love to see how San Francisco stacks up against other cities in meaningless compilations of random statistics. But sometimes we have to call out these list compilers for being just, well, wrong.

 

Take The Advocate magazine and its new list, "Gayest Cities in America." Where would you expect to find San Francisco? We suspect it's not at No. 11 sandwiched between St. Louis and Cleveland.

 

But that's indeed where San Francisco - described as "the gay daddy of American cities" and "gentrifying, but still scrappy" - winds up. The gayest city of all? Minneapolis. Yes, Minneapolis. Followed by Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Orlando and Pittsburgh.

 

 

 

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry_id=81154#ixzz1C0438UUZ

[uwsman2]

The list is totally bizarre. It's about as bizarre as the US News & World Report purported "rankings" of universities and colleges. Somebody comes up with an idosyncratic set of criteria that can be quantified and then declares a ranking.

[adriano46]

The thought of including MAINE in the list is laughable -- check how many escorts are even found in that state???? I have been to about 7 of the cities, and never in my wildest imagination would I consider ANY of them to be "gay" or even... god-forbid, "gay friendl". What were the Advocate peple using for criteria??

[+ deej]

The methodology used in the rankings of these "best of" articles is usually a combination of sloppy, stupid and bizarre. Sloppy is the way they, for example, count the number of "Lesbian bars". Stupid like why would one expect a simple linear AND POSITIVE correlation between the number of gay.com profiles and gayness? Bizzare that a journalist and his editor would both think the number of occurences of the word gay in the yellow pages was very meaningul.

In cities like S.F. or much of Chicago, or NYC, one simply doesn't need "gay" in their name or advertising, since it is often obvious, assumed, or unimportant. Hmmm might also indicate the commonplace of a surname, the name of a street or even shopping mall.

 

The telling indicator is that they measured per capita. There are a number of clubs in the Boystown area of Chicago (or West Hollywood, or San Francisco), but per capita a smaller town might rank higher with only one.

 

Recent analysis of census data did show a higher percentage per capita of same-sex couples raising children in solidly red southern states. There are probably more gays in SF than in all of Vermont, but per capita measures may put Burlington ahead.

 

This just proves that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

[Diverdan]

With all due respect to the "per capita" approach, it hardly is a true measure of a city being welcoming to GLTG folks. Some of those small towns may have a lot of gays living there, but trust me, in many ways they are discretely closeted. They hardly have the openly gay restaurants, bars, clothing stores, art movie houses, etc. that the GLTG populations support in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. They need to come up with better methods to determine their rankings. As was mentioned in other posts, a lot of various rankings of things like health, culture, health care, colleges and universities, etc. are the work of only a few people. The other day, I saw an article on the "best beaches in the world" and it was written by ONE guy, who made no bones about the fact that these were his choices, based on personal research!!!!!

So, take this article for what it is worth... not much....

DD

[raulgmanzo]

Deej your reasoned criticism of the coarseness of small sample sizes in per capita data is actually not EVEN applicable here because of the silliness of their criteria.

 

Their criteria:

NumberOfGay.ComProfiles + GayMarriageOfficiants + OpenlyGayElectedOfficials + TeganAndSaraPerformances + LesbianBars + GayFriendlyCongregations + GayUsedInYellowPages.com

divided by PopulationWithinCityLimits.

http://www.advocate.com/Print_Issue/Travel/Gayest_Cities_in_America_February_2011/

 

 

A quick look at yellowpages.com for say Minneapolis (which they rank as #1) shows a number of business listings with gay in the business name because it is a professional with Gay as his surname conducting business under his name.

 

Now I have to admit that I didn't even know what a Tegan and Sara performance was until I just looked it up. And maybe the whole article is meant to be a joke. Well what else could it be? But, well it might now be hard for me to take the advocate seriously.

 

 

The telling indicator is that they measured per capita. There are a number of clubs in the Boystown area of Chicago (or West Hollywood, or San Francisco), but per capita a smaller town might rank higher with only one.

 

Recent analysis of census data did show a higher percentage per capita of same-sex couples raising children in solidly red southern states. There are probably more gays in SF than in all of Vermont, but per capita measures may put Burlington ahead.

 

This just proves that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

[rvwnsd]

My favorite comment from advocate.com:

 

"...Come on...gay.com profiles? Really? If you want to take a census of what cities are 'so 10 years ago' then sure...."

 

Note that gay.com and the advocate are corporate siblings.

[orbital sander]

The Advocate is still around?? I thought that rag was going out of business years ago.

[raulgmanzo]

Note that gay.com and the advocate are corporate siblings.

 

Ohh thanks R.

Of course, now it all makes sense.

Think I'll try and avoid them both in the future.

[Lookin]

Now I have to admit that I didn't even know what a Tegan and Sara performance was until I just looked it up.

Same here. But I can see why they might have a following.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Detroit-hq14.jpg

[nate_sf]

For my day job recently I had to look at a bunch of these lists to develop a set of evaluation criteria for a client. And it became really apparent that so many of these top 10, or 50, or 100 lists are just a bunch of bullshit. It seems like a lot of them are put together just to create a news item, or indirectly promote a product, and the criteria is totally arbitrary and meaningless.

 

There is even a company called Sperling’s that creates endless variations of these lists, and purports to be responsible for more "Best Places" studies and projects than any other single organization. Many studies have corporate sponsors related to the subject, such as “Most Irritation Prone Cities” (sponsored by Edge shaving products) and “America’s Manliest Cities” (sponsored by COMBOS® snacks). Manliest cities you say? Here's the criteria they use: The COMBOS® “America’s Manliest Cities” study ranks 50 major metropolitan areas, using “manly” criteria like the number of home improvement stores, steak houses, pickup trucks and motorcycles per capita. The manly occupations category was added this year to recognize “the hard-working guys that make so many American cities great places to live.”

 

A big "whatever" if there ever was one!