Determining a city’s attitude towards the LGBT community is complex. Studies that try to do this often look at political or legal metrics such as freedom to marry, or laws protecting against discrimination.

Equaldex, a collaborative knowledge base for the global LGBT movement that maps the legality of homosexuality, identifies a number of factors including freedom to change gender and to adopt – although it hasn’t ranked countries or cities in order of best to worst.

An index from the Human Rights Campaign looks at municipal services, law enforcement and the city leadership’s public position on equality across the US.

Seventy-eight out of 506 US cities had a “perfect score” of 100, for reasons such as introducing trans-inclusive health benefits to city employees, as in Brookings, South Dakota. Birmingham, Alabama, obtained a full score for passing comprehensive nondiscrimination ordinances, along with other cities such as Cleveland in Ohio, a state that had previously prohibited same-sex marriage and civil unions.

However, the Human Rights Campaign clearly states its index does not and cannot reflect a city’s friendliness.

Other global surveys have tried to assess friendliness by covering public attitudes, access to nightlife and personal safety. A 2017 survey by the housing website Nestpick ranked the best LGBT cities by asking thousands of people how friendly they felt their city was based on safety and nightlife. Madrid, Amsterdam and Toronto came out as the top three.

Even when cities seem progressive on the surface, the lived experience of members of the LGBT community can tell a dramatically different story. Read more via Guardian