‘What is up with my sisters? Where are you?’ The origins and consequences of lesbian-friendly place reputations for LBQ migrants

Abstract

Drawing on a comparative ethnography of four small US cities with growing lesbian populations, this article explicates the gap between lesbian, bisexual, and queer female (LBQ) individuals’ expectations (before moving) and experiences (after relocation). The article asks how prospective LBQ migrants encounter knowledge of lesbian-friendly reputations, and, once encountered, why they are so powerful. Four mechanisms communicate lesbian-friendly reputations and make them particularly dominant, with different mechanisms doing this work to different degrees in different cases. First, some of the sites are situated in regions that possess lesbian-friendly reputations; prospective migrants attend to regional reputation, missing the heterogeneity of places within a region. Second, facts and figures mislead; while LBQ migrants conduct background research before relocating, their attention to facts and figures related to lesbian-friendliness, such as the proportion of lesbian couples, out politicians, and marriage votes, distracts from knowledge of on the ground LBQ ties and identities. Third, much initial contact with place is with heterosexuals. Many such actors – realtors, business owners, institutional ambassadors – go out of their way to present a place as lesbian-friendly to prospective migrants. Yet, such individuals are often unaware of or otherwise fail to communicate the particularities of LBQ culture in their city. A final force is the belief that a certain set of cities belong in a “lesbian-friendly” category with corresponding expectations of cultural homogeneity. Cumulatively, the article highlights the (sometimes obscuring) power of place reputation, underlines gaps between place reputation and identities on the ground, and advances knowledge of the heterogeneity and place-specificity of contemporary LBQ identities and communities.