San Francisco has the most gays; Portland, Seattle in top 5

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WASHINGTON — The San Francisco area, with its long history of gay rights and progressive politics, has the highest share of LGBT adults of any large metro in the country, according to a massive new Gallup survey out Friday that included interviews over the course of two years with 374,000 people. More than 6 percent of adults living in the Bay Area identify themselves this way. And San Francisco is followed, perhaps unsurprisingly, by Portland, Austin, New Orleans and Seattle.

San Francisco’s lead isn’t, in fact, enormous, nor all that far from the national average (about 3.6 percent of adults identify as gay). The difference between the largest and smallest gay populations among the 50 largest metros in the country is only a few percentage points – Birmingham comes in at at the bottom at 2.6 percent. But the list of cities that appear the least gay-friendly here is noticeably full of Southern and Midwestern cities in parts of the country where gay rights have not yet expanded as fast as they have in places like San Francisco. Birmingham’s appearance at the very bottom is notable given the very public intransigence of public officials in Alabama lately on marriage equality.

This is a lot less geographic variation than we see with other demographic groups, a pattern mirrored at the state level too. But these modest metro-level differences may matter to you even if you don’t identify yourself as LGBT – or even know anyone who does – because acceptance of gays is a good stand-in for the broader degree of tolerance in a city.

If gays are welcome, so too often are other kinds of minorities (or simply non-conformers). These are places where social norms (as well as legal protections) discourage discrimination of many kinds. And Richard Florida has argued in the Atlantic that it’s no coincidence the tolerant cities are among the country’s most economically dynamic, particularly as the semblance of tolerance may play a role in making cities attractive to young and creative workers.

The distinctions between cities at the top and bottom here also might be more pronounced, Gallup suggests, if this survey looked only at central cities and not metropolitan areas, sprawling geographies that include suburbs and exurbs. But you’d need to survey an even larger group of people to make that calculation. This factor no doubt matters too.

These rankings could also reflect differences across metro areas in the willingness of residents to identify as LGBT to interviewers. LGBT people who live in areas where they experience greater levels of social acceptance and often the legal protections that come with that may be more likely to identify themselves as such compared with LGBT adults living in areas in which there is less acceptance of people of differing sexual orientations. While San Francisco may be one of the most desirable areas in the country for LGBT people to live, it also may be an area where residents feel more comfortable in identifying themselves as LGBT.

Salt Lake City also ranks near the top. Gallup points out the otherwise conservative state recently passed a law that gives LGBT residents greater protection from employee and housing discrimination than they get in many states (that law, though, does include some religious exemptions).