As they walk arm in arm across a downtown street toward the entrance of a popular bar, Maggie Ryan and Melanie Moore could be an advertisement for cosmopolitan gay life. They’re decked out in tight jeans, designer boots, and fitted black overcoats, their entire look and attitude screaming urban lesbian chic. But this is far from an urban setting.
“You have to see Cowgirl Bar & Grill,” Ryan says as we approach a house-like structure with a small courtyard that looks more like a Mexican restaurant than a nightclub. “This place is great.”
Inside, a dense mix of people—gay, straight, urban hipster, and rancher boy—listen to a local pop musician pour his soul into a microphone at one end of the room. Just beyond, a lively crowd shoots pool in a small lounge. A group of women—some wearing cowboy hats that barely hide their buzz cuts—emerges from a dining room on the other side of the bar. “This is the heart of Santa Fe right here,” Moore says proudly.
Like so many of the city’s residents, Moore, 34, and Ryan, 27, came from more urban places to this high-elevation town of incredible natural beauty nestled against New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Santa Fe, they say, “is the best place” they’ve lived. It’s a place for mavericks and misfits. “And as far as being gay, it’s completely integrated,” Moore says. “We hold hands everywhere.”
Integrated. That’s how out gays and lesbians across the country portray their city or town when asked why it’s a great place to live. During a time when gay people are coming out at younger ages, many cities outside of the traditional urban gay centers have become important examples of this subtle ingredient of positive change. “As society becomes more accepting, the need for intense gay enclaves begins to dissipate,” says Gary Gates, 45, a demographer who studies LGBT populations at the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. “It’s not that they won’t need a gay community, they just won’t have to move to find it.”
Most of the gay people I spoke with for this story said they still value a strong gay culture, but ethnic diversity, good jobs, low crime rates, abundant natural beauty, and a never-ending stream of things to do are equally if not more important. Many also want good public schools where they will be accepted as parents. “We’re raising two African-American kids and no one even bats an eye,” says San Diego resident Tim Mulligan, 39, an attorney who is raising a
7-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter with his partner, Sean Murphy, 43. “We live in a white neighborhood and we’re sending our kids to a public school. A lot of times we are the only same-sex parents [at school events]. The school thinks it’s great. The sports teams think it’s great. It’s been awesome. San Diego is a beautiful place to raise kids.”
From Ithaca, N.Y., to Missoula, Mont., gay residents praise a small-town feel even before mentioning how gay-friendly their cities might be. A great place to live is self-contained, with little congestion, they say, but has enough big-city amenities to prevent the need for routine travel. “There are things going on all over town,” says Brett Gambill, 27, a gay fourth-grade teacher who lives in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s a great city. It’s not too big. Everything is 20 minutes away. But it’s big enough that you don’t feel like you’re stuck in Middle America.”
I discovered the same urban-bucolic balance in Santa Fe. It has big retail stores on the edge of town, while small pueblo-style adobe homes and businesses—the city’s official architectural style—line most of the streets and blanket the rocky hills and ravines around the city. Their rounded edges and soft colors provide a seamless transition between humanity and nature and a charming backdrop to the city’s very walkable downtown.
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