Local homosexual types might joke that San Francisco is a city of bottoms, but we're on top when it comes to having the country's largest population of gay male households.

Depending on the Census in counting gays has always been tricky, since they only recently starting keeping track of same-sex couples and gay marriages, and they've never explicitly asked questions about the sexual orientation of individuals in its more detailed Community Survey (a sampling which is used to extrapolate Census estimates for detailed data points about employment, income, etc., and they may finally start asking the gay question in 2020). And trying to depend on the Census today would be frustrating because the website is down due to the government shutdown.

But the Seattle Times has gotten all excited about new estimates for 2012, recently made available by the Bureau, that appear to show that its percentage of same-sex couple households on the rise, and they have just overtaken S.F. in that department if you're only counting by percent of households, and if you're only looking at big cities, and only by one tenth of a percent.

Gay and lesbian couples there now make up 2.6% of households (curiously up from 1.7% in 2011?), which is the highest percent out of all the 50 most populous cities in the country (S.F.'s total is 2.5%). They have an estimated 7,551 same-sex couples, representing one in 17 couple households citywide. Compare that to the more than 7,600 couples in San Francisco as of 2011, and consider the fact that, overall, S.F. still has the highest concentration of LGBT people in the nation, estimated at 15.4% of the city (as of 2006). Conservatively, that puts the gay male population here at about 57,000 in 2013, assuming a 7% concentration citywide.

As for concentrations of same-sex couples when you look at cities big and small, Fort Lauderdale takes the top spot there, where they now have 2.8% of households are gay or lesbian.

Long story short, you can rest assured that S.F. is still very, very gay. We just can't commit.

[Seattle Times]
[HuffPo]