Philly Makes Top 10 of Gay-Friendly Cities List

The folks over at consumer-advocacy website NerdWallet.com have put together a data-driven list of the most gay-friendly cities in the country — and good golly gosh, would you look at that? Sitting pretty at No. 8, sporting her super-chic sunglasses with a slice of gourmet margherita pizza in hand, is our beloved Philadelphia.

The main criteria:

• Do the laws support gay residents? (Um, well, lately they do.)
• Is there a LGBT community, and can you find peer support? (Why yes, yes you can! A big shout-out to the innumerable advocacy and peer-support groups in Philly!)
• Is the community safe and tolerant toward gays? (More so than New York, apparently.)

Numerically, the analysis compiled information from the Human Rights Campaign’s Municipal Equality Index, 2010 Census data, and a FBI Crime Statistics report. Using these resources, NerdWallet then took a gander at each of the 88 qualifying cities’ equality index, percentage of households that consist of same-sex partners, number of gay hate crimes, and overall gay-friendliness score.

Most surprising, looking at the chart breakdown of the numbers, is that Philadelphia has a big fat zero in the “gay hate crimes per 100,000 residents” category. You read that right: ze-ro. (Granted, we can all be a little skeptical of that number — not every hate crime gets reported.) It might also be worth noting that Temple University got a special mention for work its doing with the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus.

Want to know who was No. 1? See the full list here.

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