There are a lot of lesbian couples in this area - Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, Guerneville, etc. I work with several women that have recently married their long time partners and/or who are raising a family with another woman. I sometimes see what one would consider to be ‘butch’ type lesbians around town, but as a general rule, I often wouldn’t pinpoint many as lesbian if they weren’t holding hands or kissing their partners.
I donate blood every 8 weeks and I’ll tell you, in the past 2 or 3 years, I don’t think I’ve ever been in the blood center when there weren’t at least 2 or 3 women in there that had my gaydar pinging.
Huh. For some reason I’d always heard that Santa Cruz was a lesbian Mecca, and didn’t know the near-north beyond SF was the real deal. You learn something new every day.
Gay male couples may tend to be more likely to fix up houses, collect antiques, etc. as a hobby. I read a couple of different decorating magazines in which “show” houses are featured, and 40% of the time, a gay male couple owns it. Lesbian couples aren’t featured much at all and straight couples are featured most. Another point: nobody’s black. Or Hispanic. They are Asian as often as they are lesbian and usually just the wife. On t.v., I do see some lesbians, though. My spousette’s addicted to these shows, so they’re on all the time (groan).
I would never let somebody else decorate my house.
Regarding House Hunters, there was also the Lesbian couple who bought a house in New Orleans, as well as the couple in the Sweden show, and I think I have seen a few others over the years, but those two stand out.
As far as the invisibility of Lesbians…for the most part, it is true. But go to any Gay Pride Festival and you will see thousands of them - usually they outnumber the men at those festivals by two to one, easily…in both LA and in Las Vegas, they seem to appear out of the woodwork for that one day only.
But other than Pride Festivals, they almost never go to bars (hence more Gay bars than Lesbian bars by far in every major city) and they do not show up on any consumer radar, which is why no advertisers bother to spend much money searching for them - other than the occasional Lesbian cruise ship ads.
Gay men seem to go out and spend money more freely. Maybe it does have something to do with men earning more, but my guess is that Lesbians are simply more homebodies and don’t go out much as a group…in West Hollywood, CA where I used to live, there was ONE Lesbian bar, but dozens of Gay bars, and although you would see the occasional Lesbian couple at restaurants, bookstores or coffeshops, for the most part they truly were invisible - even in that “Gay Capital” of California.
Dang. Didn’t expect this much response. I am still awed by the U-Haul thing (and that it has a wikipedia entry).
At least I see that this is not just a product of my perception.
Is it true that lesbian couples are outnumbered by gay couples? Are gay couples overrepresented in these shows? Does the census separate gay-lesbian couples from same sex pairs sharing a house out of convenience? (before marrying I often shared a place with other guys, never got censed, though).
Anyways, I am afraid AuntiePam might have it right. Are lesbian couples more likely to have children than gay couples? Because that sure kills disposable income.
Many of the Aussie ones live in my suburb of Northcote, Melbourne - apparently one of the lesbian capitals of Australia. One of my favourite things about my great neighbourhood is the eclectic mix of old Greek mamas, boho hippy dinks, 4-year olds in fairy wings and lesbians.
In Chueca. At least that’s the way people from Madrid tell it. Not having much interest in Madrid, I haven’t checked it.
The last time the Spanish census ran, some genius from a GLBT group tried to use it to claim every case where two people of the same gender, not first-grade family, as a gay-or-lesbian couple. It took every TV channel and radio station about 5 seconds to find several cases of grandma living with granddaughter, trot out that NPO which matches University of Reus students with old folk who would otherwise live alone, and of course as many flat-sharing students as you care to count.
My mother was initially incensed by the fellow’s numbers. Then I pointed out that the way he counted, my uni housing was a 70-female students and 15-nuns orgy
There are also the shows in House Hunters of “single professional woman in the early to mid 30s” that want a new house. I always suspect a few of those are lesbians.
US Census stats for gay and lesbian couples in 2000:
Same sex male households 304,148 0.50%
Same sex female households 297,061 0.49%
I forgot the way the Census words the question, but it’s in a way that can only mean “gay couple.”
The US Census just began tallying gay and lesbian couples in 2000. I think the numbers may be somewhat undereported, but it’s interesting to see patterns when you crunch numbers. In the work I’ve done for some Cleveland suburbs, I found more female same sex couples than male same sex couples, but I attribute it to the fact that lesbians are less likely to cluster in “gay ghetto” neighborhoods than gay men. ( Cite: http://www.gaydemographics.org/USA/2000Census_Gay_zipcode.htm )
There are areas where one will see a higher-than-normal concentration of lesbians, but fewer lesbian equivalents of a Chelsea, West Hollywood, Boys Town, Lakewood, Capitol Hill, or Dupont.
One interesting pattern: there’s more rural lesbians than rural gays. Rural lesbians tend to live in “rugged” areas like the Rocky Mountain west.
I’d also imagine that there are some who don’t want to (for whatever reason) “broadcast” that they are a lesbian couple and instead go with the “roommate” story for these shows.
Back when I lived in Brooklyn (mid-90’s), there was a large lesbian population in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Don’t know if that’s still true.
For many years, and still today, there is a large lesbian population in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. I was just there over Labor Day weekend and there were countless f-f couples walking down the streets and boardwalk, hand in hand. We were waiting at a cross-walk at one point and one couple right next to us was engaging in a brief make-out session while we all waited for the walk signal.
Well, in Melbourne, the suburb of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northcote,_Victoria is now renowned as Lesbian Central: previously a lower-working-class inner suburb, it began the gentrification process in the late 1980’s and was later appropriated by dykes with dosh.
Male homosexuals are more spatially dispersed throughout the suburbs, but most (because of lifestyle/employment choices and income opportunities) are found in the inner urban areas too: sharing many suburbs with other liberal dinks and yups with similar lifestyle aspirations.
I watch HGTV a lot, and though I don’t see a lot of shows devoted to gay house-hunters/redecorators, I do see quite a number of them touring the open houses on shows like Designed to Sell. It does seem to me that the gay couples I see represented are the more affluent ones who don’t need help with deciding how to disguise a cracked piece of tile.
Personal experience at PFLAG events corraborates this. There are more lesbians than gay men at these events, but the lesbians don’t seek out the media except to give interviews, and they (mostly) don’t dress up to get attention.
Too many of the males seem to think the event should look like la Cage au Mardi Gras, and they are the ones who get media attention, while my daughter and her friends are over to one side laughing at the sow.
A friend who lived in Alaska for several years told me that Juneau had a goodly number of lesbians, and that many of them held high positions in state government. This was in the 90’s. She had a good joke about the ratio of men to women in Alaska but I’ve forgotten it – something about flannel shirts.
Apparently those TV shows aren’t venturing to Toronto, where there’s a large lesbian community who seem to spend much of their time renovating and flipping houses in the Leslieville area - just pop by the local Home Depot on a weekend and you’ll find plenty of them. (Interestingly enough, there’s a rather large UHaul lot in that area too… hmmmmm)
As far as TV goes, I think part of the issue is that the gay male demographic is somewhat overrepresented when it comes to the fields of interior decorating and real estate, as compared to their sapphic counterparts… so, natch, you’d see more gays on home decorating/buying/selling/flipping shows.
