Vancouver, WA makes gayest cities list

Northbank gay bar in Vancouver

It seems like my little home town, which I lovingly call the ‘Couv or Vantucky, is seeing its 15 minutes of fame these days. Later on we’ll have an interview with an out Skyview high school athlete conducted by new qPDX sports writer Aly Sneider, and right now I’m here to tell you that The Advocate ranked Vancouver, WA as the 6th gayest city in the country!

Now neither Portland nor New York City made the list, which of course brings their radically unscientific methods into question. If they hadn’t listed SF I would have called this list the gayest cities you never knew were gay. But alas, they admit their highly theoretical equation for coming up with the gayest cities could have produced these odd results.

They took ad random signifiers of gay-friendliness, awarded points to each and divided the raw scores by the population of the city. These consisted of gay.com profiles, listed officiants for gay weddings within 50 miles (read Portland was included), openly gay elected officials, Tegan and Sara performances over the last 5 years (uh, random…), lesbian bars (so the E Room closing didn’t help us any), gay and gay-friendly religious congregations, entries in the yellow pages with “gay” or “gay-friendly” in the description (who uses the Yellow Pages anymore? They should have used Yelp), and population within the city limits (andthentheymovedthedecimalpointoverabit, whatever that means). So maybe this list os more about the most mainstream or family-friendly gay cities. But it’s an honor for the li’l ‘Couv nonetheless.

In this way Vancouver definitely benefits from it’s proximity to PDX. Even though it’s tiny in comparison to the other cities, the smallest on the list by far, it has plenty of homosexuality to live up to just across the river. So I hope we’re a good influence on our li’l brother to the north. This is what they said in their description:

One gets the sense that a lot of those groovy gay and lesbian Portlanders are mellowing out and coming here to settle down. Friendly, low-key, neighborhoody Vancouver is right across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore., and has bars such as the Northbank (106 W. Sixth St.) with affordable happy hours and uncrowded pool tables. The city of around 165,000 has six gay-friendly churches, and its Skyview High School has a student-led gay-straight alliance.

I’m glad they mentioned Skyview, even though it wasn’t part of their ranking system. The breakdown is in the image below.

I also want to congratulate my favorite midwest town, Minneapolis, for making number 1 on the list.