Portland Has the Second-Highest Percentage of Same-Sex Households in the Country

In the 2019 U.S. census, 2.6% of Portlanders said they have the same gender as their spouse or partner.

Winter Lights Festival, downtown Portland. (Sam Gehrke)
By Shannon Gormley

Portland has long prided itself on being a queer-friendly city. Now, new numbers back that self-image.

According to a recent brief about the 2019 American Community Survey conducted as part of the U.S. census, Portland has the second-highest percentage of same-sex households of any metropolitan area in the nation, behind only San Francisco.

In the 2019 survey, 1.4% of married Portlanders responded that they have the same gender as their spouse, and 1.2% of unmarried partners in the Portland area reported that they share the same gender.

Of course, tallying "same-sex" couples and "opposite-sex" couples is a binary measurement, and ignores queer Portlanders who aren't the same or the opposite gender as their partner. And federal census representation is hardly an end goal for queer liberation.

Still, on the long list of superlatives Portland has been given, "second-highest percentage of queer households" is a pretty good one—and not just because it's much less arbitrary than "Best City for Dogs" or "Most Cookie-Crazed State."

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