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Newsstand: November 27, 2009
Contrary to Tourism Toronto's advertising campaigns, Toronto's not all that gay-friendly, at least according to Amherst College political science professor Javier Corrales. In his recent article, The Gay-Friendliness Index of World Cities [PDF], Corrales ranks Toronto forty-fourth, as we apparently only have sixty gay-friendly businesses and four gay-friendly organizations. Obviously, these numbers are absurd; Toronto has hundreds of gay-friendly businesses and organizations (just take a look at the business listings on gaytoronto.com). In fact, according to Ric Tremaine, media spokesman for the Gay Toronto Tourism Guild, whether a business is gay-friendly or not really isn't an issue in Toronto anymore, as almost every business is. "Money is the driver," and businesses, explained Tremaine, "have become gay for pay."
Corrales, who claims that his report "presents the first-ever index of "gay-friendliness" of world cities," only consulted one source to make his list: Spartacus International, a gay-friendly tourist publication from Germany, with little to no commercial interest in Toronto (or much of the rest of the world). In Corrales' defense, his article focuses on Latin America, not Toronto, but that's still not an excuse for sloppy research.
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Slap one of those new ads on there and it would be the gaytheist bus!
The main problem with the index is exactly what you mention—they don't factor in the element how people in Toronto generally don't care that much anymore. You don't need to be a gay theme park to measure your degree of gay friendliness—the dullification of Church & Wellesley seems to prove that. When people are no longer as oppressed by the tyranny of the majority, the ghettoization of gay bars, facilities, and districts starts disappearing.
Anyone who doesn't classify Toronto as one the world's most gay-postive cities is living in a parallel universe anyway.
Toronto makes me gayer. Honestly. It's like a CN tower polarization thing. Every time I go to North York I feel all the homosexual urges draining out of me, and I start thinking "this could be a nice life, I could have children and a fawning husband and a pink sweater-set" but once I get a bit past Eglinton I feel it flooding back and it's all tegan and sara time.
HA! loves it.
His data also seems to overstate the population of Toronto as it shows a population of 5,300,000.
He's probably counting the Census Metropolitan Area for Toronto (which includes Ajax, Oakville, Newmarket, etc.) rather than just the Census numbers (which includes only the City proper). You can see a side-by-side comparison of the demographics of each area here.
Counting CMAs is not confined to Toronto. The whole report equates many large metropolitan areas with their respective city propers i.e NYC as having 21.8 million people instead of 8.2 million.
This consequently diminishes the rankings of traditional gay-friendly cities, such as Toronto or New York, in favour of much smaller centres like Prague or Antwerp. It overestimates their significance by using GBLT establishments per million as the defining measurement tool. The top 10 is a result of this fatal attraction. And the entire report suffers accordingly.
This methodological flaw is significant. But it's not the only one. By only using the three largest cities in any given nation, San Francisco, arguably the gayest city of them all, doesn't even make the list.
Its academic credibility is further undermined by its choice of source material: using Spartacus as a determining tool makes this report more suitable for publication in Spartacus than in a respectable academic journal. Were more sophisticated data sets not available?
What happened to peer review? This thing should've been killed before it ever made it to press.