The author of this story is a high school teacher, analyzing this chart: (As with all sites that deal directly with homosexuals and homosexual behavior, language warning at the link.)
gayestcities.jpg
Does this tend to match your observations of gays in real life? Does the prevalence of gays track with the prevalence of generally de-sexualized individuals in the public sphere? Talk amongst yourselves.
gayestcities.jpg
Zooming back out, it's striking how few of the nation's cultural capitals and fun-loving destinations are heavily infected. New York, LA, Chicago, Miami, Nashville, and Dallas are no-shows. Boston and Las Vegas just barely chart. Note that the size of the city and cost of living do not make the difference, as San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, DC, Atlanta, Denver, etc. have no trouble attracting crowds of queers.
Academic or intellectual capitals are more encouraging because the residents are nerds with no sex drive, hence there is no potent heterosexuality to freak out and drive away the Peter Pans who still find girls yucky. In combination with the result about Puritanism, this suggests that a population where the majority is asexual will be the most tolerant toward homosexuals. That whole domain of life just doesn't register on their radar, so how could they get disgusted by flagrant deviance and try to shame it back into the closet?
I think you see this pattern operating at the global level as well. Joyless races like the East Asians and the Scandinavians are way more tolerant than the ebullient Mediterraneans and Middle Easterners.
France is an especially fascinating case here -- they're the one country that contributed much to the Enlightenment, yet has an active mainstream (not fringe) movement against gay marriage. But then France is not made up only of egghead Parisians in the northern Plain -- there are all those honor-oriented highlanders in the eastern and southern parts, particularly along the Mediterranean coastline. The inheritors of the Troubadours do not want to see their glorious boy-meets-girl tradition corrupted...
Academic or intellectual capitals are more encouraging because the residents are nerds with no sex drive, hence there is no potent heterosexuality to freak out and drive away the Peter Pans who still find girls yucky. In combination with the result about Puritanism, this suggests that a population where the majority is asexual will be the most tolerant toward homosexuals. That whole domain of life just doesn't register on their radar, so how could they get disgusted by flagrant deviance and try to shame it back into the closet?
I think you see this pattern operating at the global level as well. Joyless races like the East Asians and the Scandinavians are way more tolerant than the ebullient Mediterraneans and Middle Easterners.
France is an especially fascinating case here -- they're the one country that contributed much to the Enlightenment, yet has an active mainstream (not fringe) movement against gay marriage. But then France is not made up only of egghead Parisians in the northern Plain -- there are all those honor-oriented highlanders in the eastern and southern parts, particularly along the Mediterranean coastline. The inheritors of the Troubadours do not want to see their glorious boy-meets-girl tradition corrupted...
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