Patterns of Gay Male and Lesbian Partnering in the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Areas of the United States in 2010

In this paper we use the recently released 100 % data from the 2010 Census to analyze patterns of gay male partnering and lesbian partnering in the metropolitan and micropolitan areas of the United States. We first used census method to adjust the number of same-sex household due to the sex miscoding problem and then develop indexes of gay male partnering and lesbian partnering for every one of the 374 metropolitan areas and 581 micropolitan areas of the United States in 2010. We next describe and relate the partnering patterns separately in the metropolitan and micropolitan areas and compare their spatial patterns with those of heterosexual married and unmarried partners. We then test various hypotheses relating characteristics of the metropolitan areas and the micropolitan areas with the gay male and lesbian partnering rates.