I guess you can call this another part of my forever series on how much I loathe Republicans. And now, with Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis having signed the wicked “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law, I guess I just have some more to say on the matter.
But it looks like everyone, everywhere has more to say on the matter. It’s also got me thinking. Florida. Nice enough, sure. I love Key West. I’ve had fun in Fort Lauderdale. I’ve even been to Gay Days at Disney, but that was a while ago. And sure I’ll go back to vacation, barring any further anti-gay laws I suppose. But could I ever move to a red state? You know, pack everything up and relocate? I don’t know.
There was a graph circulating on social media this week from the Williams Institute, a UCLA public policy think tank specializing in sexuality and gender. The graph showed social acceptance of LGB people (note this graph did not include the T) by state, including D.C. Bringing up the bottom, well below the national average, were your bastions of rightwing thought and deserts of dentistry West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. You could probably guess the top tier, too — Vermont, Hawaii, Massachusetts. But sitting far ahead of even those was our little D.C. We were, like, way ahead. We’re the gayest city out there. Granted, being a sort of city-state without any benefits of an actual state (column for another time), we sit alone in many ways. And if you plucked out New York City, San Francisco, and even New Orleans or Houston, the race for the top spot in the graph of gay might be a bit tighter.