If you played a word association game with 100 people, half of them would blurt out “Gay!” when you flashed San Francisco’s index card. And indeed we are. We have a giant rainbow flag that flies over a leather store, a Pottery Barn, and a food truck that only serves crème brulée. We have Looking, the HBO show about gay 30-somethings. We have Hard French and Up Your Alley and Tout Sweet Patisserie and Dykes on Bikes and a Sing-Along Little Mermaid at the Castro. We even have sunsets in the same ultraviolet hue as Pantone’s 2014 Color of the Year, radiant orchid or fabulous fuchsia or whatever it is. But apparently, this city is just not gay enough for some people.
Not for the Advocate, anyway, which awarded the title of Gayest City in America to Washington, D.C. The city where Michele Bachmann works and Antonin Scalia lives. Frightfully square D.C.
Totes unfair. Cultural trappings aside, we are the gayest city even if you count only one very simple metric: percentage of adults who identify as LGBT. (Although when it comes to households headed by same-sex couples, Fort Lauderdale is first, Seattle second, and SF a close third.) Still, we should be glad we made the list. In 2012, when Salt Lake City won, San Francisco was merely an honorable mention – right along with D.C. You could still be naked in public then, too. Obviously, this is an annual rite of trolling by a magazine that only last month aped Time by awarding its Person of the Year to Pope Francis. (He’s a nice pope, by papal standards, taking his name from the same saint as the, ahem, gayest city in the country is named for). But no LGBT icon, he.
“Officially,” San Francisco is the 11th-gayest city in America, a notch above Rochester, N.Y., and behind Arlington, Virginia. We lost to a suburb! Some of the Advocate’s criteria – number of Mariah Carey concerts, most gay rodeos – are so ridiculous as to make the whole exercise a transparent joke which the Advocate’s own staff is in on.
So I get it. But personally, as a San Franciscan and the epitome of otter glam, I am rankled. No offense to Washington – and after we had to go without an Eagle for more than two years, I’m glad their Eagle found a new home. And snark aside, it is important to recognize that there are LGBT people everywhere, even in the painfully straight hinterlands between Telegraph Avenue and the Hudson River. Even in the county where no one’s gay.
But why does San Francisco have to be snubbed every year, like Susan Lucci at the Daytime Emmys? We should at least get a patronizing Lifetime Achievement Award out of this. How many dudes do I have to make out with so that we win in 2015? Because seriously, I will.
Image by nathanmac87 via Flickr