The Advocate, a gay magazine born of struggle for equality back in the day but which has seen better days itself, just published a list of the 'Gayest Cities in America,' and you know what? San Francisco came in at number 11. ELEVEN! How is that possible, you ask, when by some accounts one in five men in this town prefers the penis to the vagina, and where we basically invented gay marriage AND glory holes? Well, it's possible because the Sadvocate used some asinine formula involving Gay.com memberships (hint: no one uses that site anymore), yellow pages entries with the word 'gay' in them (no one uses those either), number of openly gay elected officials (we have lots), number of Tegan and Sara concerts in the last five years, and the number of gay wedding officiants, which they obviously got wrong.
Which cities to they judge to be gayer than the gayest city on the planet? St. Louis! Vancouver, WA which is like 150,000 people! Pittsburgh, for christ's sake! And what's number one? Minneapolis. Does anyone who has lived in Minneapolis actually think that place is gayer than S.F.? Now really.
Don't they know we have our own gay museum now?!!
Do we even need to explain how ridiculous this is? Who reads the Advocate, we ask you? The kind of elder gays whose straight counterparts still watch the evening news, that's who. And they have just further cemented their irrelevance by invoking Gay.com and failing to use simple demographic and census information, which we believe would prove them perfectly silly and ignorant. (Full census data for 2010, which is only really going to count out gay couples and families, not singles, and already shows a massive number of them in Jacksonville, Florida, will be released soon.) And no, Advocate, Cleveland is not about to become a gay hot spot just because the Gay Games are happening there in three years.