“There’s an openly gay presence that makes you think you’re in the Castro or West Hollywood, and it wasn’t always the case,” Robert Raben, an assistant attorney general during the Clinton administration who was one of several openly gay people appointed by President Clinton, told me. I’m not the first to have noticed this change. One of my first observations about my new city was the throngs of gay men I would see over the course of a typical day all over town - walking their dogs in my neighborhood before work, riding the Metro, working in the halls of Congress. The national average is just under 1 percent. The Census Bureau looked at where the highest percentage of same-sex couple households were and also found that the District of Columbia ranked far higher than the 50 states, with 4 percent. 2, Hawaii, and nearly triple the overall national average of 3.5 percent. At 10 percent, that is double the percentage in the state that ranks No. When the District of Columbia is compared with the 50 states, it has the highest percentage of adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to Gallup. Consider what surveys by Gallup and the Census Bureau have found about the gay population here. I now live in the gayest place in America.īut don’t take my word for it. Today, having moved here 10 months ago after six and a half years of living in Manhattan, I hardly recognize that closeted, often intolerant Washington I first glimpsed as a 20-year-old.
But instead of being widely accepted, they were usually whispered about derisively, suspect characters to be mocked and maligned. But the message was as clear as it was unsettling for a 20-year-old struggling with his own sexual identity: There were plenty of gay people in Washington, even at the highest levels of government. I wasn’t even sure what the congressman’s name was. “You know what they say about him,” said one of them, the inflection of his voice rising to a squeak so there could be no mistaking what he meant. I was a few blocks from Union Station when a congressman walked by and gave the reporters I was standing with a big, floppy wave hello. WASHINGTON - My earliest sense of what it meant to be gay in the nation’s capital came more than a decade ago when I was a summer intern.