In their ongoing obsession with Dallas, Cowtonians love to play it up big any time we beat the Beast to the East. But a recent study about the number of same-sex couples in the two cities doesn’t seem to have most locals all that excited.
The Williams Institute of the UCLA law school studied recent census figures and came to the conclusion that Fort Worth is the 23rd “gayest” large city in the country, with Dallas coming in at 24. The margin for victory in this race was very tight – Cowtown had 8.51 same-sex couples per 1,000 households, and Big D 8.5.
Some think the shift is due to more gays in Dallas coming out and moving to the suburbs. Others point out that Fort Worth has never had a gay-centric neighborhood like many big cities, so that even gays who come out tend to remain scattered throughout the city. “Fort Worth has a bigger closet than Dallas,” Gary Gates, one of the researchers of the study told the Dallas Voice. Well, hot damn, there’s another Fort Worth brag – a bigger closet than Dallas. Let’s have a beer.
Under the Hat, Our Ears Burn
The Houston Architecture Forum recently posted a thread (“The Most Overshadowed City in America”) asking members what they thought of Fort Worth. The Space City conclusion: Fort Worth’s kind of blah – not well known for much of anything even in Texas and now pretty much a suburb of Dallas. “FW is FW’s biggest problem,” wrote one member about the obsession with Dallas. Others said they disliked the “slow pace” and someone said that “downtown was cute, but I would hardly call it cosmopolitan or big city … everything seems vanilla and [has] no real soul.”
What – they don’t think chain restaurants, the Basstapo, two movie theaters, fake building facades, and lots of high-end condos add up to “soul”? Do they know about the gas well to be drilled under Bass Hall? Have they seen the spaceship at the south end of downtown? Didn’t they read the same-sex couples survey? What do these people want?
Of course, remove the “soul-less” insult and most folks in Fort Worth would be perfectly content with being seen as slow-paced, overshadowed, and cute. That’s what makes us special.
