Where it is best to be LGBT in the United States (infographic)

The Guardian (UK) has published a nifty information graphic breaking down gay rights in the US, state by state. Issues like marriage, adoption, employment discrimination protection, hate crime laws, and whether schools have regulations to ban harassment based on gender and sexual orientation. Is the rainbow color scheme of this blatantly pro-homosexual infographic a coincidence? I think not. (via @janinegibson)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: gay rights • human rights • lgbt

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Teller

I’d say David Geffen’s pool.
Antinous / Moderator

Hellhole locator.
- awjt
  
  Yes, if you can handle the totally fuct up weather, high cost of living, high taxes, shitty jobs and social retards, New England is basically paradise.
  - Melinda9
    
    It looks like the ‘social retards’ have moved elsewhere.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      I think he means in the sense of knowing only 100 words and 75 of them are ‘wicked’.
      - awjt
        
        Jeezum Crow! What’s that on the chimbley? A lobstah or a block a cheddah? I jes bout clumb a tree tryin’ ta pahk mah cah.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        One thing you have to like about California: no ceramic climbing cats. I’ve tried to explain it to people out here and they just think that I’m making it up. Same thing with the bathtub half buried in the front lawn with a statue of the Blessed Virgin in it.
      - IronEdithKidd
        
        Anti – the bathtub thing extends almost to the Mississippi river. Tell us more about these ceramic climbing cats?
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Circa 1960, you could see whole streets in Massachusetts where every house had one or two of these on the brick chimney. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jen/6860843468/
      - BlackPanda
        
        As a Britisher, I’m curious about what a “ceramic climbing cat” is. I was shocked by my visit to NH back in 2004. Every house in Concord appeared to have a full-blown nativity scene on their front lawn, and many had giant inflatable Santas… and Grinches… :/
      - BlackPanda
        
        As a Britisher, I’m curious about what a “ceramic climbing cat” is. I was shocked by my visit to NH back in 2004. Every house in Concord appeared to have a full-blown nativity scene on their front lawn, and many had giant inflatable Santas… and Grinches… :/
      - IronEdithKidd
        
        Anti – thanks for the link. I’ve probably seen the climbing cat in the past, but when you’re going for tchochkys in the front yard, there tends to be too many for a person to focus on just one ridiculous object.
  - Navin_Johnson
    
    Compared to impoverished, McJob, neoconfederate hellholes I’m certain it is.
    - Bill Wood
      
      But… but… your screen name is Navin Johnson. He was raised in an impoverished, McJob, neoconfederate hellhole, sir!
  - BookGuy
    
    I’ve lived in the Northeast most of my life, and sometimes I forget that the rest of the country has nothing but idyllic weather conditions, plentiful jobs, and progressive ideas about human rights.
    - SomeGuyNamedMark
      
      I have to laugh about people who go on about New England weather. While we had 60-70 degree weather this winter and spring we watched blizzards in the midwest and tornadoes on TV.
      
      I’d rather have a mild New England winter than a suffocating FL summer.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I grew up in Massachusetts. You forgot mosquitoes.
    - SomeGuyNamedMark
      
      Pretty sure you can find mosquitoes in other states too.
    - awjt
      
      true, the list of bads is seriously quite long… although, I have to stand up for the wonderful serenity available here if you know where to look.
    - niktemadur
      
      Ah yes, the mosquito, the unofficial Alaskan State Bird.
      - IronEdithKidd
        
        You’ll have to find another state bird. Minnesota claimed the mosquito before Alaska was a state. ;-)
  - SomeGuyNamedMark
    
    Please keep believing that, it keeps New England a nicer place to live.
  - fuzzyfuzzyfungus
    
    It’s hard being better than the rest of the country; but we’ve had a long time to practice…
Bodhipaksa

It’s an amazing graphic, although my friend Roy G. Biv insists it’s not a rainbow :)
http://www.facebook.com/will.fertman Will Fertman

Massachusetts? Royal Rainbow!
- Brainspore
  
  As the King of the Cosmos once said, “We are moved to tears by the size of this thing.”
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  Bring us your tired, your weak, your lesbians and gays…
http://re-becca.org/ Rebecca Turner

I just wish it were actually accurate. A number of those places (MA for instance) have all of those rights for LGB folks, but (some) not for T folks.
- Coderjoe
  
  The info graphic states in the middle “Gay rights by type”. T folks are already excluded by the graphic.
- quince
  
  MA is getting better! You don’t have to indicate gender on marriage forms http://offtopic.akrasiac.org/?p=59 and more significantly, as of July 1 we will have gender identity protection for housing and employment http://www.masstpc.org/ter/ . Not to say that there aren’t areas where there is still work to do, but I wanted to highlight progress that is happening, since so often it feels like trans activists are shouting into a void.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=749833892 Florian Braun

I’d like to be proud of my state but Wisconsin seems mostly special in spelling out how all these rights are to be limited…. sigh, at least we’re not Mississippi.
- semiotix
  
  In Mississippi when liberals who occasionally like to have sex with members of the same sex (like me!) want to console ourselves, we say “at least we’re not the 99.7% of Wisconsin that isn’t Madison (excluding Maple Bluffs and the west side) and certain Milwaukee suburbs.”
  
  Of course, it’s kind of a dickish thing when we do it, too.
Ito Kagehisa

I would love to know the reasoning behind the categorization of Delaware.

EDIT: I was not wondering why Delaware was considered Northeast (although it is rightly midatlantic, of course) I was wondering about the “limited” and “undefined red stripy” categories in the graph. I apologize for my poor grammar.
- http://BrianEaston.net/ Brian Easton
  
  North of the Mason-Dixon Line.
  - Manny
    
    They have Maryland in the Northeast, too, and the Mason-Dixon line is its northern border.
  - Ito Kagehisa
    
    The state of Delaware is EAST of the Mason-Dixon line; the western, northern, and southern state borders were surveyed by Mason and Dixon and are the starting point of their eponymous line. Maps pretty much all get this wrong, but the physical markers still exist here.
  - Ito Kagehisa
    
    The state of Delaware is EAST of the Mason-Dixon line; the western, northern, and southern state borders were surveyed by Mason and Dixon and are the starting point of their eponymous line. Maps pretty much all get this wrong, but the physical markers still exist here.
- http://twitter.com/Sightlab75 Thom
  
  The brits can’t get a handle on mid-atlantic.
- cminus
  
  Because that’s where it belongs.
  
  Culturally, the northeast has been expanding south for centuries. Delaware and Maryland were border states in the Civil War, but now they’re both solidly northern. Along the east coast, a bright-line border between north and south would be somewhere near Fairfax, Virginia, and slowly moving south every year.
  - Ito Kagehisa
    
    I entirely agree with you, although the cultural borders in Pennsylvania seem to be quite a bit less tangible.
  - Ito Kagehisa
    
    I entirely agree with you, although the cultural borders in Pennsylvania seem to be quite a bit less tangible.
- Ultan
  
  And Texas is in the southeast? Maybe the piney woods from Bastrop on east, but that’s maybe a third of the state. (Even the rest of Texas finds that part a bit backward.)
  
  What about West Virginia? It has more in common with Ohio than with Virginia – in fact, it seceded from the latter. It didn’t have slaves. It was mostly a frontier wilderness. It belongs in the midwest.
  
  As a Confederate state east of the Mississippi, Missouri belongs in the southeast, not midwest.
  
  ID, MT,WY, CO, ND, SD, NE, KS, OK, TX, NM, UT, AZ should get their own category. I’d call it just “West”. That leaves CA, WA, OR, HI, AK as “West Coast”
  - EvilSpirit
    
    Your Confederate state east of the Mississippi lies, in fact, to the west of the Mississippi.
    - Ultan
      
      Oops, quite right. Still on the river, though, and culturally closer to the southeast than midwest..
- Ultan
  
  And Texas is in the southeast? Maybe the piney woods from Bastrop on east, but that’s maybe a third of the state. (Even the rest of Texas finds that part a bit backward.)
  
  What about West Virginia? It has more in common with Ohio than with Virginia – in fact, it seceded from the latter. It didn’t have slaves. It was mostly a frontier wilderness. It belongs in the midwest.
  
  As a Confederate state east of the Mississippi, Missouri belongs in the southeast, not midwest.
  
  ID, MT,WY, CO, ND, SD, NE, KS, OK, TX, NM, UT, AZ should get their own category. I’d call it just “West”. That leaves CA, WA, OR, HI, AK as “West Coast”
Brainspore

Damn, Mississippi.
- http://plantsarethestrangestpeople.blogspot.com/ mr_subjunctive
  
  And Michigan. And Utah.
  - Brainspore
    
    Indeed. But at least Utah has decent ski resorts.
    - Joshua Ochs
      
      Yeah, but Mississippi has… um… uh… well, shit.
      - http://www.facebook.com/people/Cooper-DiBiase/100000445446098 Cooper DiBiase
        
        In its defense Mississippi does have guys who pour and layer significance all over the way they say “mmmhmmm,” which I really appreciate.
  - IronEdithKidd
    
    Yup, Michigan. A little slice of the deep south plunked onto the northern tier.
- llazy8
  
  You say that, “Goddamn” . . .
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkcuNX4vrS8
Jason Baker

Don’t forget, if you live in North Carolina like I do, today’s the day to keep that rainbow as bright as it can be. Well, kinda. Gay marriage is already illegal here, so if the constitutional amendment passes it’s more like they’re coloring in the grey with a permanent marker.
http://twitter.com/jmck John McKenzie

Not coincidentally, best places to be straight too.
- chgoliz
  
  That was my sense of the chart: it’s equally useful as an indication of the local status of human and civil rights in general. Funny how that works.
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  I’ve noticed that places that are popular with gay people tend to be fun in general.
moop2000

Boom! Go DC! We are often forgotten, but check us out! We aren’t full citizens like the rest of the country, and Congress likes to overturn our local laws quite often, but we are doing pretty well I’d say.
- http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin
  
  Except for all the murders.
  
  DC has great legal protections for trans folks, but it also has lots of violence and murders and ‘walking while trans’ arrests against trans folks.
niktemadur

LGBT… in general, I wish “political correctness” would reverse the trend that George Carlin had something to say about in another context:

WWI: Shell Shock (simple, straightforward, 2 syllables).
WWII: Battle Fatigue (still understandable, we’re up to 4 syllables now).
Korea: Operational Exhaustion (8 syllables and Madison Avenue is squeezing the humanity out of the phrase).
Vietnam: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (and the pain is completely buried under jargon).

LGBTSSOFFMOS: Lay Gesbian Bigender Transsexual Sub-Strata Of Fully Functioning Members Of Society?
No way José, “Queer Nation” and party on, people!
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=781965222 Ken Breadner
  
  I just stumbled across QUILTBAG the other day. I can’t even remember what the acronym stood for. My best friend, who is gay, is really bothered by all the names and labels and jargon. “Ken”, he said to me once, “why is it there’s no single word for people with brown eyes, or blue eyes, or green eyes, or…”
  “Because it doesn’t matter”, I said.
  “Exactly. Who I choose to spend my life with makes no difference to anyone else.”
  - Brainspore
    
    Shouldn’t matter. But does matter, legally speaking.
  - niktemadur
    
    QUILTBAG: Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender/Transsexual, Bisexual, Allied/Asexual, Gay/Genderqueer.
    
    What is THIS trying to achieve? Somebody, at some point, thought this was a good idea. Here’s another one, HIGGBATs: Hypersensitive Individuals Gone Goofily Berserk with the Acronym Thingy.
    
    And still the “Demolish Serious Culture” picture winks at me from the unscrollable right column, influencing my posts. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, it’s a good mantra.
    - Brainspore
      
      I’ll give them this: QUILTBAG is a lot easier to say than LGBTQQIA.
    - Wreckrob8
      
      It was the armed forces who first got the ‘acronym thingy’. How and why it spread, I don’t know.
      - niktemadur
        
        You mean SNAFU? Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. And I believe the term surfaced in the Tarawa atoll victory/fiasco. But anyway,
        
        FUBAR – Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
        FUBB – Fucked Up Beyond Belief.
        TARFU – Things Are Really Fucked Up.
        
        And my personal favorite, both specific and nonsensical,
        JANFU – Joint Army/Navy Fuck Up.
        
        Ah, bureaucracy, he sighed, in the Max Weber sense.
      - niktemadur
        
        You mean SNAFU? Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. And I believe the term surfaced in the Tarawa atoll victory/fiasco. But anyway,
        
        FUBAR – Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
        FUBB – Fucked Up Beyond Belief.
        TARFU – Things Are Really Fucked Up.
        
        And my personal favorite, both specific and nonsensical,
        JANFU – Joint Army/Navy Fuck Up.
        
        Ah, bureaucracy, he sighed, in the Max Weber sense.
Tlazolteotl

The graphic for Washington State is a little deceptive. This year the legislature did approve marriage equality here, but some church groups are trying to get a referendum on the ballot to repeal that. If they get enough signatures, marriages are on hold until at least December.

WA residents – Decline to sign!
Greg Miller

Just reminds me of how far we have yet to go.
Daemonworks

The Northeast is so good because it’s the closest part of the US to Vancouver.
- Daemonworks
  
  No, wait.. that’s northwest.
  Hmm. Totally unxplainable then.
  - ashypete
    
    I guess you’ve never been to Montreal…
ZenMonkey

Iowa? I had no idea. Good for them! I’m very proud of MD and D.C., where I grew up.
http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin

If this covered trans folks, I think it would have to show the few jurisdictions which:

1. Don’t have politicians calling for our murder.

2. Don’t have discriminatory identification policies.

3. Don’t kick trans kids out of homeless shelters.

4. Don’t throw trans womyn in men’s jails to extract plea-bargains.

5. Do include trans status in nondiscrimination laws.

A lot of those places which have employment, housing, and public accomodation protections for non-trans LGB folks do not have these for trans folks.

You might want to revise the title to match what this doesn’t and doesn’t show.
Ashley Yakeley

WA FTW!
Joshua Ochs

I want to see a dozen more graphs of American social attitudes on that exact same type of graph. I expect we’ll find a lot of the same basic graph shapes (New England agreeing with the Pacific coast, and the Midwest and South in a bloc).
Joshua Ochs

Pennsylvania. Dicks of the Northeast (and where my family hails from – shame).
SomeGuyNamedMark

There seems to be a pattern in the SE and Midwest.
http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson

Seriously, Pennsylvania belongs in the Midwest. I know it’s 350 some odd miles wide and borders NJ and all that, but, really, just look at all that grey in the graphic.
- http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin
  
  Parts of it are in the midwest. West of the Appalachians, north of the Ohio, east of the Mississippi. I wonder why some people think Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Iowa, and Montana are in the midwest though, they’re on the other side of the Mississippi.
novium

Is it just me, or are the state grouping on this chart just a little odd? The Northwest/Southwest division just seems strange. Especially with California and Hawaii being grouped as Southwest and Nevada looking like an odd outlier nestled next to more conservative states…
http://www.facebook.com/esmeralda.ruppspangle Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle

So basically, the closer you are to the ocean, the more likely you are to believe in basic human rights. Weird.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_FCENLYPOGK2VR5PIIEZBRKWMUU bigomega73
  
  I had thought that once, until I remembered that the South borders the Gulf. Yes, the US actually has a South Coast!!
jwkrk

It would be nice to see a version of the graphic where the slices of states are sized proportional to their population.
- http://twitter.com/MrWeeble James Hardy
  
  In the top left click ”
  Scale states by population”
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    That makes it slightly worse.
    - jwkrk
      
      Yep, we have a ways to go…
  - jwkrk
    
    Thanks, I missed that.
cmwfs

The State of Pennsylvania has Pittsburgh in the West, Philadelphia in the East and Alabama in between.
- faithnomore
  
  Yeah (sigh). I’m from south of Pittsburgh and my husband refers to the area as “Pennsyl-tucky”. I joke that the most common greeting in my home town is “hey cuz” (cuz = cousin), except, well, it’s not really a joke.
  
  And I don’t understand all the northeast bashing upthread: given my PA upbringing, I’m happy as a clam here in MA.
hogan

This is so sad. For a nation wherein the politicians think themselves as a world leader…. Just so sad.
hogan

The entire chart is be filled with colour!
- niktemadur
  
  And glitter! Wearing only tanga briefs and flip-flops in city streets!
  
  My mother was hospitalized in an intensely LGBT San Diego neighborhood (Hillcrest), and I gotta say, heading out and watching these guys partying on a hot August night, it unfroze my solemn scowl.
LikesTurtles

Here in the South the problem isn’t so much that we think that marriage should always be between a man and a woman, it’s just the natural outcome of our belief that sodomy should only be practiced by large corporations on the populous. And oh boy, do we ever love to have companies, especially ones that use to be Yankee companies, come down here and bend us over. It’s our heritage.
http://profile.yahoo.com/DL6ODIMUJGGLOTKJH7T4P6VSYY jon

fuck yeah vermont!