Patterns of Gay and Lesbian Partnering in the Larger Metropolitan Areas of the United States‪.‬

Since the 1990s, there has been increased interest in the trends and patterns of gay and lesbian cohabitation, a phenomenon known also as same-gender (or sex) unmarried partnering. According to data from the 1990 U.S. census, households headed by same-gender unmarried partners represented as much as one sixth of one percent of all households enumerated (Fields & Clark, 1999). Data from the 2000 Census indicate a significant increase from 1990 in the actual numbers of gay and lesbian couples who report themselves in the Census (Armas, 2001; Cohn, 2001; Gillman & Langford, 2001; Poston, Gu, & Walther, 2003; Simmons & O'Connell, 2003; Smith & Gates, 2001). The increased interest in the distributional patterns of gay and lesbian partnering is associated with increases in the visibility of gays and lesbians. For example, the homosexual community has become a political force on the national scene and in many large cities, pushing for local and national laws dealing with inheritance and health benefits, among other issues (Castells & Murphy, 1982; Knopp, 1990; Lauria & Knopp, 1985; Weightman, 1981). Areas where gays and lesbians have settled have become, according to O'Reilly and Webster (1998), "gay spaces" with political force and activism. Those U.S. metropolitan areas with the larger gay and lesbian settlements--for instance, San Francisco, New York, Houston, and Los Angeles, among others--are often the gay spaces that receive the most national attention. But there are concentrations of gays and lesbians in virtually all metropolitan areas of the country. However, with but a few exceptions (Black, Gates, Sanders, & Taylor, 2000, 2002; Poston et al., 2003), there has been little effort among social scientists to index these concentrations and examine the extent to which the indexes are associated with the social, ecological, and political characteristics of the areas.