From the 2012 Seattle Pride March: Sarah Champion creates a rainbow balloon arch (Photo: Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times)
June is Pride Month, and here’s some great news to kick off the celebration.
A new report names Seattle the friendliest city in the nation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.
To honor this year’s Pride, personal finance website NerdWallet compiled a list of the top-20 LGBT-friendly cities. They considered three factors for their rankings:
1. Presence of gay community, based on U.S. Census data on the percentage of households with same-sex partners in each city.
2. LGBT-friendly laws and opportunities, based on the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Municipal Equality Index.
3. LGBT safety and tolerance, based on FBI data on the number of sexual orientation-related hate crimes per 100,000 residents in each city.
Seattle aced all three categories. No city has a higher percentage of same-sex partner households (we broke that news last year here on FYI Guy). Seattle also had a perfect score of 100 on the HRC equality index, and a relatively low rate of sexual orientation-related hate crimes at 0.95 per 100,000 residents.
With a final score of 96.8, Seattle easily beat out No. 2 San Francisco.
For a complete list of the top-20 cities, go to NerdWallet.com.