LGBT people don’t just settle in cities because they prefer amenity-rich, walkable neighbourhoods with good coffee and good food (though we do tend to like these things a lot), but because there’s strength and comfort in numbers. It’s nice to be around your own kind, not only to avoid discrimination, but because where there are gay and trans people, there are resources for gay and trans people. And perhaps most importantly: if you live in a neighbourhood with a sizable LGBT population, there is far less chance your kid will be the only one in his or her class with two moms or two dads.

For queer families, the question of moving away from an urban centre isn’t a simple choice of city vs. suburbs; it’s a choice between continuing to blend in vs. sticking out like a sore thumb.

This isn’t to say in any way that suburban and country folk are inherently more homophobic than city folk. I grew up in the suburbs and I am a proud member of the 905 clan. I also know from first-hand experience that there are plenty of bigoted jerks in the city. But in the ‘burbs and in the country, there are also, without a doubt, far fewer openly queer people living in close proximity to each other, which means that kissing your same sex partner on the sidewalk or holding her hand in the grocery store elicits more stares in Richmond Hill than it does on the Danforth. And why wouldn’t it? We look longer at things we don’t see everyday.

This is one of many reasons LGBT people try to stick together in some fashion, even when they are priced out of urban centres. There’s a popular myth that increasing widespread tolerance of queer people in North America is slowly but surely making gay neighbourhoods obsolete. “But if that were the case,” says Amin Ghaziani, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia and the author of the book There Goes the Gayborhood, “we would expect these LGBT individuals and families to disperse either across the city or in the suburbs. But that’s not what we see.”

What we see, says Ghaziani, who has researched LGBT populations in major cities, is that gay and lesbian couples with kids form their own “cultural archipelagos,” typically in a suburb directly adjacent to the city in which they once lived. As an example, Ghaziani points to Oak Park, Illinois, a neighbourhood right outside Chicago that is now home to “multiple clusterings of same-sex households and same-sex households with children.”

“There are still not enough families with same sex parents to make the neighbourhood a gay neighbourhood,” says Ghaziani, “but you walk down some streets and see a rainbow flag on the porch.” In other words, there’s a visible gay presence in the suburb of Oak Park.

Ghaziani says he wouldn’t be surprised if LGBT people in Toronto followed suit and queer-ified a suburb of our own.

There’s just one glaring problem: The suburbs of Toronto aren’t marginally cheaper than the city itself. Modest family homes in Richmond Hill, Mississauga, Newmarket etc., can put a person out nearly a million dollars or more.

Unless LGBT Torontonians make a collective decision to plant our rainbow flags somewhere moderately affordable (like, say, Niagara Falls) we may have no choice but to buck the gay suburb trend and disperse far and wide, where our kind is few and far between.

What we will lose, in the end, isn’t just a unified culture, a safety net, and a local bar that shows RuPaul’s Drag Race, but something arguably way more precious: the luxury of feeling ordinary

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