“But now they come out for the first time online, and that changes, for some people, the need to leave.”
“For a generation, they all remember the moment they walked through their first gay bar,” said Paul Boneberg, executive director of the G.L.B.T. The regional gaps in political attitudes, religion and ethnic makeup are often much wider. The share of San Francisco’s population that’s gay is only two and a half times larger than the share outside major metro areas. It’s a reflection in part of increasing tolerance and of social connections made possible by the Internet.įrank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup, notes that the regional variation in sexual orientation and identity is much smaller than the variation in many other categories. And even the parts of the country outside the 50 biggest metropolitan areas have a gay population (about 3 percent) not so different from some big metropolitan areas. Nationwide, Gallup says, 3.6 percent of adults consider themselves gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Gay America, rather than being confined to a few places, spreads across every major region of the country. Significant as these differences are, the similarities are just as notable.
