San Francisco Bay Area California

Vallejo among the top cities in the Bay Area for gay couples

At least that's what Ric Duran and his partner, Richard Johnson, told themselves when they left San Francisco to rehabilitate a home in the Heritage District of Vallejo.

They never left.

"After about three months, we fell in love with Vallejo," Duran said.

Duran and Johnson are just one of hundreds of gay couples in town. The U.S. Census Bureau released statistics last week that showed Vallejo had about 500 households, or 1.2 percent, headed by a same-sex couple. The bureau tracked both married and unmarried couples, like Johnson and Duran.

This means Vallejo is among the top 15 Bay Area cities in terms of its gay and lesbian population, according to an analysis of the census data by MediaNews Group.

By comparison, San Francisco has about 10,000 same-sex households; Oakland has about 3,400; Richmond about 420 and San Rafael, 300.

Tony Hutchinson, who married his partner of 23 years, Christopher Wilson, when same-sex marriages were briefly legal in California, said he was not surprised at Vallejo's numbers.

Wilson said members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) community would be drawn to Vallejo for its gay bars and its gay club, Pegasus, during the 1980s. The city has only one gay bar now, the downtown Townhouse Cocktail Lounge.

There was a migration of gay couples from the traditional hub of San Francisco in the late 1990s to Vallejo, Hutchinson recalled.

"You had Vallejo with all these gorgeous old Victorian (homes)," Hutchinson said.

Many couples who wanted to settle in Vallejo and were rehabilitating those homes left Vallejo mid-gentrification when the housing crisis hit, he added. Still, Hutchinson and Wilson said there are more LGBT people in Vallejo now than a decade ago.

Hutchinson also said that Vallejo schools in the late 1990s had a poor reputation -- something many childless gay couples didn't really care about, he said.

According to the U.S. Census, about a quarter of the state's 126,000 same-sex households are raising children.

The ferry that connects Vallejo to San Francisco also provided an easy commuting option for the new gay residents, many of whom still worked in the city, Hutchinson said.

Part of Vallejo's attraction to Duran and Johnson was the friendliness of city's people.

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