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A couple of days ago I posted about The Advocate’s 15 Gayest Cities in America article, and Blenders dove in with gusto in the thread, challenging some of the selections.
Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny looked at the 15 cities and decided to spin the piece on its head and ask the question — Who Are They Electing To Congress? After all, one measure of how “gay” a city is not how many gay bars it has, but how many of these cities have openly LGBT elected officials, or have sent pro-LGBT pols to Washington.
By that measure, it’s a mixed bag for sure.
There are also 3 gay elected officials in town [Atlanta]. In fact, that’s one of the criterion for deciding how gay a city is. Do they elect gay officials? Iowa City also has 3, as do Austin, and Seattle. Springfield has one. Madison has 4 (and I don’t know if that includes the outstanding member of Congress who represents that part of Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin). Burlington has none (neither do Bloomington, New Orleans, Ft. Lauderdale, Portland, Gainesville, Asheville, Albuquerque, nor San Diego).
Now, Atlanta wasn’t disqualified– and it certainly isn’t Atlanta’s fault that the state of Georgia has chosen to elect two of the most viciously homophobic senators in the United States, Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss (each of whom rates a flat out zero on the ProgressivePunch Senate gay rights scorecard. At least the members of Congress who represent the Greater Atlanta Metropolitan Area itself are mostly gay-friendly. Hank Johnson (D) has a clean 100% score on gay issues as does civil rights champion John Lewis (D); David Scott (Blue Dog) a shady 75.00; Tom Price (R) a startlingly anti-gay 20.00 and Phil Gingrey (R) a flat out zero.
And of course, in my blog post about the Advocate article, I bragged on Asheville at #12. Truth be told, using Howie’s criteria, we get spanked hard, since the city is in the district of Blue Dog Homophobe Rep. Heath Shuler.
Asheville may be an artsy “prime example of the new gay South,” as The Advocate terms it, but their congressman, Heath Shuler (D- 50.0%) is a member of the homophobic C-Street cult and he is a dedicated enemy of gay families. He’s the only Democrat representing one of these gay cities to have voted against the hate crimes bill (once it was guaranteed passage, Hill voted aye; Shuler still voted “no”).
…#4 is Bloomington, Indiana, our first really sad story. Evan Bayh (D- 100%) and Richard Lugar (R- 100%) both surprised me with perfect voting records. The sad part is the local congressman from Bloomington, homophobe Baron Hill (Blue Dog- 60%) who was one of only 15 Democrats to vote against the enabling legislation for the hate crimes bill, has one of the lowest scores on gay issues of any Democrat in Congress, slightly worse than his Indiana Blue Dog colleague Joe Donnelly and a fraction better than homophobic maniacs Allen Boyd of Florida, Artur Davis of Alabama, John Barrow of Georgia and fellow Indianan Brad Ellsworth.
Howie goes through the whole list in similar fashion. Of course there are bright lights on the list (Madison, WI, Seattle), but most of the cities fall short on the formal equality meter, despite having significant LGBT residents.
So it’s speculation time — what might this mean?
Well, speaking as someone who lives in a region with a sizeable gay community in a Southern state, there are a lot of people socially out and professionally closeted because of a lack of a state anti-discrimination law. That means less politically active gays since they don’t want to be out and risk repercussions. So it’s up to those who work in jobs at private businesses with protections to stick their necks out. That cuts the number down. Of course then you have to factor in the folks who aren’t out and active in the struggle for political equality because they aren’t out to family or because of a church community they also belong to.
That, friends, leaves you with a handful of people willing to be visible activists. It’s only when you increase those numbers enough can you mobilize a serious voting bloc to elect out gay or pro-gay candidates in a more politically hostile environment. Even when it is a favorable environment, look at the ~100-vote squeaker Mark Kleinschmidt pulled off in Chapel Hill (which didn’t even make The Advocate’s list) , when it should have been a slam dunk.
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Iowa CityI don’t know who was being counted as elected in Iowa City, but yesterday Janelle Rettig was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. She was already serving via appointment, but the election was for the right to stay on the Board.
San Diegohas a gay city council member (Todd Gloria), the first 1,000,000 plus city to have an openly lesbian mayor (Toni Atkins, now running for State Rep), and an openly lesbian State Senator (Christine Kehoe, who previously served on the City Council and as State Rep, and nearly won the congressional seat in 1998).
Just to set the record straight, so to speak.
NCAsheville certainly is a gay-friendly city but once you step outside of the city limits you are in hardcore red-state territory. Majorly conservative right-winged areas. Frankly, I’m still sorta surprised they got a Dem congressman at all….Asheville is only a single city of a pretty large, spread-out congressional district.
As gay-friendly as it is though, it still wouldn’t be my first choice of an NC city on such a list. Certainly Chapel Hill would rank higher in some aspects. But some of the frivolous categories they used, like the “gay bars per capita”, CH probably got zero points.
I bet though, if you could merge all the gay stuff in the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill/Carrboro together, we’d rank pretty darn high.
San Diego has TWO gay councilmembers and moreDon’t forget out, gay, Republican City Councilmember Carl DeMaio.
And don’t forget we have an out lesbian District Attorney, Bonnie Dumanis.
And, until she retired, we had a lesbian Fire Chief, Tracy Jarman.
Whoever wrote the piece in the Advocate should be canned for not actually doing their homework.
Seattle is gayer The city has two gay city council members (Sally Clark and Tom Rasmussen) and three state legislators (Ed Murray, Joe McDermott and Jamie Pederson) for a total of five public officials — not the three indicated in the article.
The basic notion behind the Advocate article is worth exploring, but it would be better if they’d taken an extra day to verify their research.
BTW…The only reason that there had been an election was that a ‘fiscally prudent’ republican forced the county to hold a special election that everyone knew the appointed replacement was going to win.
The pricetag? $75,000.
The price of Republican fiscal hypocrisy?
Priceless$75,000 – at least in Johnson County, Iowa.If you include Dane County, Madison’s numbers of elected out officials pretty much doubles, as several of the County Supervisors elected from Madison districts are LGBT.
Madison also has an out gay state assemblyman, Mark Pocan.As chair of the budget committee, he’s also one of the most powerful lawmakers in the state.
One of the facts concerning the older gay meccasThere were those LGBT pioneers who stepped up, when it wasn’t easy or safe to be openly LGBT. We had clout in some cities, sometimes it was even smaller than city-level, to precinct level where we had enough LGBTs to back up the decision to be openly gay, and thereby the community got stronger protections put in place for others to come out.
Not sure where he gets his facts about Burlington..By my count we have one openly gay city councilor, one state representative and one state senator. I don’t necessarily agree with the Advocate’s ranking but I do think if you are are going to critique it you should use accurate info.
I’m actually suprisedThat little Providence didn’t make it. We have a fairly high gay population, an openly gay Mayor, openly gay Majority Leader, semi-closeted 3rd in line, and State Rep Frank Ferri (But he’s Warwick, not Providence)
It isn’t like there aren’t gay people here, and gay people in some fairly high positions.
Chapel Hill-CarrboroI think we have a gay on certain day(s) bar. But on lgbt officials or local pro-lgbt resolutions Chapel Hill-Carrboro (Orange County, NC) wins by a long shot.
Equality NC keeps a list of LGBT officials past & present in NC:
http://www.glcvb.org/lap_rdu.php
And here is the new mayor of Chapel Hill:
During Pride weekend Chapel Hill puts rainbow flags up on the street lights in downtown. And Carrboro & Chapel Hill were first & second to pass the pro-marriage equality resolutions in the state. And if you throw in Durham which passed it next, and holds the state pride event & gay & lesbian film festival, and Raleigh with all its clubs, then the triangle is one of the gayest areas in the South, especially for NC.
RE Bloomington…
Though I have no idea who’s on their city council at the moment, the relevant facts based on my knowledge of twice living there and having once, long ago, been the president of Bloomington Gay & Lesbian Alliance remain true.
Without its Indiana University student population, Bloomington would just be another small, Bible Belt town. Out of some 70,000, approximately 40,000 are temporary residents: IU students. Another 50,000 or so nonstudents complete the county’s population.
The most common characterization that one could hear about it for decades is that it’s the San Francisco of Indiana, hyperbole based more upon its contrast with how conservative the state is than how liberal Bloomington is itstelf. For example, as in 99.9% of America, you won’t see anything remotely resembling the Folsom Street Fair in Bloomington soon, if ever.
Still it is quite LGBT-tolerant overall but no more than many other university towns around the country. IU probably had the first gay group in the state, and has hosted some great LGBT conferences, and the city passed one of the earliest gay rights ordinances in the country later overturned by a suit based on the law that no local ordinance can grant more rights than the state does. As I recall, they eventually passed another one, but it has little real bite for the same reason.
In general, I’d say that, despite rather predictable annual picketing by area echoes of the inbred Phelps clan, and the occasional instance of anti-LGBT graffiti and/or violence, most local LGBTs feel pretty comfortable with no local rights issues to become agitated about; that’s not “gayest,” but “post gay.” [The Christmas murder of a gay prof by a 25-yr. old acquaintance is at once a virtually unheard of event and a reflection of how much homophobia still exists among some of the "natives."]
And a downside of this “warm bath” is that too few protested IU agreeing to accept a privately-funded series of lectures on “leadership” to business students by former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter “DADT is good/homosexuality is immoral” Pace failed to get him booted.
There are lots of great people there, but LGBTs there who aren’t conservatives themselves [remember the some quarter of the self-identified gay vote McShame got nationally] know that they live in an area in which, while they might continue to elect a Democratic mayor, as they have for over three decades, the chances of sending anyone more progressive than current Blue Dog Dem. Baron Hill, with only a 50% HRC rating and not a cosponsor of any pro-LGBT legislation, to Congress are slim.
Now let’s consider the rationale for its inclusion by the Advocate’s “amateur sociologist”:
1. Magnet? True. I was one of those who moved there decades ago from another IN town specifically for its reputation, even then, of being the gayest place IN Indiana. But, I finally ESCAPED the state entirely as many others still living there would if they could.
2. Miss Gay IU? That’s not “forward-thinking” but Low Retro wherein “gay” ipso facto equals “drag queen.” Uh, we kinda figured out that wasn’t true roughly 40 years ago. Better he’d saluted the IU GLBT student services center and the city government’s participation in anti homophobia programs.
3. Kinsey Institute as a local beacon of “heteroflexibility”? Except when it periodically gets in the news when some state or federal Troglodyte tries [yet again] to have it shut down, few remember that the Kinsey Institute is there because it intentionally keeps a very low profile in the interest of its survival, something it’s had to fight for repeatedly since the great Kinsey himself was alive. [He's an oft-forgotten...except by the Antigay Industry...early martyr to homophobia for nothing in his famous studies angered many more than his revelation of the extent of homosexual experience.]
The bisexual Kinsey and the publicly closeted IU Chancellor who fought to protect his research, Herman Wells.
But how seriously could we take any “study” of “gayest” cities in America whose critieria include “gay dating and hookup profiles, “cruising spots,” and “gay films in Netflix favorites” all of which are just as easily interpreted as indicators of “least gay accommodating” or, at least “loneliest” if so many are disproportionately desperate for a date that they have to resort to the Internet; desperate for sex that they seek out [mostly] shady [literally] cruising areas, and are hom[o] alone watching gay videos they got in the mail?
There’s much still to like about the Advocate, but this survey is right down there with the time a number of years ago that they printed the obituary of the still very much alive gay pioneer Frank Kameny.
FAIL!
Indiana: Kinsey and the Klan1. Kinsey’s first book on male sexuality was controversial but sold an astounding number of copies. Describing sexually active men was nothing new, and most of the book addressed heterosexual activity, so on the whole the anxious American man was flattered by the statistical implication that he was a horndog.
Kinsey’s real offense at the time was his female sexuality book, which informed American men that yes, a lot of perfectly ordinary women had premarital sex, and the little wifie might be comparing hubby to her previous/ other partners. Putting this obvious truth into print was far more challenging to the vanity of ordinary heterosexual men than the implication that ordinary heterosexual men have been known to have engaged in occasional man-with-man sex, which could be passed off as frat-boy stuff: “I was SO horny and SO drunk, I don’t remember much, but if it had a body temperature above ambient, I fucked it”.
2. The state of Indiana had significantly more Klan members than any other state in the 1920s, and most of the areas around IU were “sundown towns/counties”, as in “n……, you better not be here after sundown”. One of the small towns between Indianapolis and Bloomington had police who patrolled the roads in and out of town, and picked up black students and drove them to the town limits facing Bloomington and told them not to show their faces near town again. In the 1920s, the Klan was more concerned with Jews and foreigners than blacks, since the blacks knew to avoid certain counties and towns.
criteriaOther problems with the Advocate’s criteria:
1) Same-sex households per capita (using HRC and U.S. census data)
Last U.S. census was 10 years ago. Not exactly current data for the “latest” updated gay cities list. And while it is possible the HRC is conducting telephone surveys to determine same-sex households, they would have to make hundreds of thousands of calls to get any kind of realistic picture of smaller cities/towns across America, and it seems more likely their data is from donation records. These records are likely to be skewed toward the primary cohort that can/will donate to the HRC: wealthy, white, male, urban. And if donation records are the source of the data, was the data collected before or after the GayTM shut-down? And how did that movement impact their statistics?
2) Statewide marriage equality
Doesn’t make sense to judge gayest cities by the progress of their entire state on marriage & unions. There are plenty of evolved islands surviving in much bigger stinky backwards swamps.
3) Gay elected officials
Others have made points about this criterion, but I would add that it isn’t just the sexuality of the (local) elected officials that needs consideration, but their politics. Are they actually liberal-progressive, or just Democrats?
4) Gay Dating & Hookup Profiles (from census data of single men, etc.) 5) Gay bars per capita 6) Cruising spots per capita
In addition to other criticisms already made, still focusing on the G in LGBT.
7) Gay films in Netflix favorites
(nothing to add to others’ comments)
This was clearly a puff piece making a biased attempt to list and justify some new cities we just haven’t seen on this list previously. So what would better criteria be?
Percentage of elected city officials with liberal-progressive politics vs. MOR vs. right-wing
Number of out queer elected/appointed city officials
Presence of LGBT community centers, social organizations, support organizations, and LGBT owned or supportive businesses
Presence of city-wide anti-discrimination pro-equality laws. Particularly the presence of laws protecting transgender folks and marriage equality, since these are the cutting edges for a lot of prejudice.
Presence of an annual pride parade/march, LGBT film festival, coming out day rally, or other pro-LGBT event.
Number of churches relative to population that perform same-sex commitment ceremonies and/or marriages.
Number of hate crimes relative to population – and not just anti-LGBT hate crimes.
Percentage of population subscribing to the Nation, Rolling Stone, NYTimes vs. National Review, Christian Music Times, and the Westboro Baptist Church newsletter.
[your criteria here]
These are some of the metrics that tell me if where I’m living is “home,” or if I need to keep looking.