Customer Reviews

Gay & Lesbian Atlas

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4 star:		(1)
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This atlas is clearly the gold standard in gay and lesbian demographics. The authors have used the most concrete data available to create one of the most comprehensive and user-friendly books available on the topic. The analysis and methodology is surprisingly readable. The maps are vivid and very easy to follow. I've left the book on my coffee table and everyone one of my friends has picked it up. I thoroughly enjoy watching them thumb through their home states and hearing them exclaim "There are gay people there?" This atlas is a useful tool for marketers, service providers, policy makers, and anyone looking to know more about their gay and lesbian neighbors.

This book makes it very easy to find information about where we live in the united states and presents it in such a way that arguments can now be backed up with factual data taken from the US census. It is easy to read and very informative. A must have for anyone interested in gay studies.

This book is amazing! It's content and presentation are both truly wonderful. Between the brilliant statistical slicing and dicing of the census data (thanks to Dr. Gates) and the wonderful and insightful maps and charts (thanks to Mr. Ost), this book really hits home. It gives a lay-person (straight or gay) the ability to understand where the gay and lesbian communities are, where the gay couples with kids are, where the gay seniors are, and so on. The text is surprisingly easy to read and understand (only surprising in that the topic and technical details have the potential to be intolerably dry). The authors cut no corners in making the data approachable and understandable and at the same time applicable and accurate--a really hard thing to do given the nature and complexity of the topic matter.

Bottom line, gay and lesbian couples are EVERYWHERE. And for the first time, thanks to Dr. Gates and crew, people outside the gay community can see and feel it.

Gary Gates and Jason Ost have presented a carefully crafted volume, filled with gist for tremendous insights. Their methodology is clearly explained, and they have done an admirable job of trying to portray cartographic imagery of the gay and lesbian population of the United States.

This volume certainly belongs in every public and school library in the country.

And yet, I experienced a certain amount of frustration while poring over the state-by-state and city-by-city maps portrayed in this volume. This frustration does not stem from the admirable work of the authors, but rather from three sources largely beyond their control.

First among these sources of frustration is that the census data collected on same sex coupling, enticing as it is, leaves much to be desired. The census methodology makes the imputation of lesbian and gay populations difficult, at best. The only enumeration is of co-habiting "unmarried" partners of like gender. Left out are couples where neither is the 'head of household', couples not living in the same residence, or who are living in group quarters (such as housing complexes, nursing homes, and correctional facilities). Also left out are single gay & lesbian people, those who do not declare their relationship as an "unmarried partnership", and those who are currently cohabiting with a partner of dissimilar gender, or are in some other form of less traditional relationship status.
The limitation of our knowledge base to cohabiting couples of similar gender is frustrating when trying to imagine the exhuberant diversity of our communities as displayed across geographic space.

My second frustration stems from the difficulty in displaying information that is highly dependent on population density. In the maps these authors portray, the vast majority of the country looks as though there is a paucity of gay and lesbian couples. This is chiefly due to the fact that rural settings take up a lot of "space" on the map, while urban clusters are often barely visible, let alone the small-area variation in the prevalence of couples across the urban landscape.
The authors have tried to overcome this difficulty somewhat by displaying blow-ups of various cities (such as San Francisco, Houston, Boston, etc.), but often these maps of cities are so de-contextualized from their surroundings that it is difficult to visualize the residential patterns of similar gender couples. For example, Boston is displayed without the integrally linked cities of Cambridge and Somerville that (at least anecdotally) contain a large proportion of Boston's gay and lesbian community.

My third frustration stems from the fact that the authors have presented only one measure of gay & lesbian residental patterns (to be fair, three measures: one for gays, one for lesbians, and one combined). This is a relative measure, which is a bit more difficult to interpret than an absolute measure, such as the proportion of similar gender couple-headed households, would have been, because the 'normal' reference for each state is different, making parts of rural North Dakota look as queer-friendly as Manhattan.
Furthermore the authors have limited themselves to a single gay/lesbian index, presumably because of the prohibitive cost of producing a volume with multiple indices. The drawback to this is that a variety of audiences will be interested in more than the relative concentration of lesbian and gay households to all households. The census, for instance, has elected to present data on same sex households as a proportion of all coupled households, rather than including single person households, or households in which the adults have no stated relationship. Other viewers may wish to consider only those households where the head is over a given age.

Much of these difficulties could be overcome by creating an accompanying website which would allow a reader/viewer to zoom in and out according to their own particular preferences, and to display the index of lesbian/gay residential density of greatest interest to them.

All in all, this volume is a tremendous effort and acheivement, hampered not by the authors' originality or effort, but by inescapable quirks of census data collection, and the ability of our minds to grapple with spatial information.

Bill Jesdale, Providence RI (by the way, the finest queer community in the country...)

I recently had to put together a business plan to target the gay and lesbian market here in south Florida. This book provided very valuable insight, and gave me some solid statistical information to bolster my plan.

I hope they do the book again after the 2010 census!

The importance of this empirical contribution by Gates & Ost cannot be underestimated - and not only for the gay community but for American communities. This book is not only a geographic and demographic masterpiece, but a coffee table gem I believe would please even Edward Tufte, "the Leonardo da Vinci of data," if he just happened to be sitting on your couch.

Whether you are an activist talking to policy makers about the needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender communities, or simply moving and want to know what zip code in your new state, city or town would make you the happiest, you need this book as part of your library.