If you want to find the gay neighborhood in a new town, look for the tanning salons, according to a new analysis. Neighborhoods with high proportions of gay and bisexual men are twice as likely to have an indoor tanning salon than other neighborhoods.

Some will try to argue that the tanning industry is targeting gay and bisexual men ("just like Big Tobacco" is the cliché) but they are already six times more likely than heterosexual men to tan indoors so the stores are going up where the customers are. Due to high usage, gay and bisexual men are about twice as likely to suffer from skin cancer as heterosexual men but all people should stop using tanning beds.



The study used census data paired with business locations in neighborhoods in the 10 U.S. cities with the largest numbers of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender residents. The researchers used self-reported male-male households as a proxy for the prevalence of sexual minority men in each neighborhood.

They found that neighborhoods in which male-male households accounted for at least 10 percent of the total unmarried households (so five times the demographic average) were twice as likely to include an indoor tanning salon than those in which fewer than 10 percent of the households were male-male, even after correcting for socioeconomic differences, including income and race.