Madison makes Top 10 list of most LGBT-friendly cities

Madison ranked No. 10 on the Queer Index, a listing of the most LGBT-friendly cities in the United States.

The list was released by Vocativ, a "global media organization for the digital generation," and is based on a survey of the country.

Vocative, in a news release, said the Queer Index is an analysis of dozens of quality-of-life factors from 100 U.S. cities using a technology that "mines the deep Web."

According to the index, Los Angeles is the top city in the country for LGBT people, followed by New York, San Francisco, Des Moines, Iowa, and Chicago.

"For Pride Month, we wanted to create a useful, fun guide to LGBT life across the country," said Scott Cohen, CEO of Vocativ. "We started off with a simple premise: What's life really like for the queer community. From there we homed in on the community's passions, concerns and daily realities—and then we started collecting the data. Diving into the numbers, we learned new things about known LGBT meccas. For example, New York City has the most hate groups in the country. We also found countless surprises. Who knew that Memphis has the most single lesbians per capita in the country?"

Said Mati Kochavi, founder of Vocativ, "To get a snapshot of LGBT life across the country, the traditional approach would be to collect the opinions of a few so-called experts. But big data and the deep web allow Vocativ to go infinitely broader, into a world free of spin and full of hidden truths, where stories reveal themselves. The Queer Index shows just how fast LGBT rights and public opinion about that community are changing—and not just in big metro areas, but also increasingly in smaller cities throughout the country."

The index showed:

• The Washington, D.C., metro area has the highest percentage of out adults. At the same time, the nation's capital has the highest number of anti-LGBT hate groups.

• The highest percentage of single lesbians is found in Memphis, Tennessee.

• Three of the top 10 U.S. cities by population do not make Vocativ's top 35 list: Houston (No. 4), Dallas (No. 9) and Phoenix (No. 10).

• NYC is America's capital for LGBT hookups: There are over 2,000 same-sex "casual encounters" posts on Craigslist every day, and it has the most bathhouses and "rentboys" per capita.

• Los Angeles is great for gay drinkers but not so much for lesbian drinkers: The city has 2,424 gay bars but only 168 lesbian-specific watering holes.

• Of the top 100 largest U.S. cities, Boston had the highest number of sexual-orientation hate crimes last year: 63.

• Atlanta has the highest number of LGBT-friendly businesses in the country, 685—over three times more than the next highest city.

The top-ranked cities according to the Queer Index are, in descending order:

Los Angeles, California

New York, New York

San Francisco, California

Des Moines, Iowa

Chicago, Illinois

Seattle, Washington

Albany, New York

Rochester, New York

Denver, Colorado