DETROIT, MI – Red Wings fans dressed in jerseys seem amusingly confused on a recent Tuesday night walking into Park Bar expecting sports on the TVs and instead seeing Duran Duran’s “The Chauffeur” and a transvestite video that is a take-off of Sir Mix-A lot’s “I Like Big Butts.”

Tuesday nights at the Downtown Detroit bar, located near Comerica Park at 2040 Park Ave., are Doggy Style nights, a weekly party for Detroit's gay community.

“The idea here was to take a place where we already hang out and make it gayer,” said Robert M. Nelson, who hands out politician-like pins that say “Robert M. Nelson." “This is a place where we can go to listen to music that is not the White Stripes.”

Indeed, the organizers of the weekly event are proud of the sometimes Avant-garde background visuals they offer the setting, but more importantly, they are happy to have a place where they can gather and find support in a city that seems to lack a condensed gay community.

Joe Posch founded Doggy Style night at The Park Bar with Canine to Five owner Liz Blondy in 2007 because of what he says is "disjointed" gay community. There's a relatively strong gay presence in Ferndale, but the city of Detroit itself lacks any cohesive or strong LGBT community, he said. Nelson likens Detroit to the “gay diaspora.”

To get an idea of where Posch, who owns the Hugh retail store in Midtown, was coming from as Doggy Style started, here is what he posted in his Supergay Detroit blog about the state of the city's gay community:

The Park Bar welcomed the idea. Owner Jerry Belanger, who renovated the space shortly before Doggy Style began (and who also owns St. Cece’s in Corktown with sisters Celeste and Collete), said there was "no hesitation whatsoever" in letting Doggy Style take off there.

“Of course, everyone is always welcome, every night,” he said.

Scanning the room on a recent Tuesday night, men, women and transvestites seemed to intersperse fluidly with young men and women in Red Wings jerseys. One person at Doggy style estimated that of the five dozen or so people at the Park Bar that night, about 60 percent were from the gay community.

The estimate seems to be similar to what all demographers have to work with when nailing down Detroit's actual LGBT population.

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The U.S. Census Bureau only measures homosexual population by number of households who identify as a same-sex couples. The Williams Institute at UCLA does a better breakdown of the Bureau's numbers, in terms of same-sex couples (which leaves out LGBT singles) and found that based on the 2010 Census, Pleasant Ridge has the highest percentage of same-sex couples in Michigan, followed by Ferndale. Detroit ranked 20th in Michigan, behind places such as Grand Rapids, Muskegon, Lansing and Port Huron.

According to numbers from the American Community Survey, Detroit does not rank in the top 10 cities by percentage or total number of LGBT population.

Anecdotal accounts refer to Palmer Park as a strong gay community for Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s, until much of that gay community moved to Ferndale.

The 25-year-old Motor City Pride weekend celebration and parade announced a move from Ferndale into Downtown Detroit in 2011. Moving the festival, which draws about 45,000 people annually, got a mixed response from the community.

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Posch said he would like more than just a night where the city's seemingly sparse gay community is celebrated. He and others said they want to establish a "gay neighborhood."

One area they say might be ideal is West Village. There, the streets are walkable, there is retail, and the layout is cozy, Posch said.

“You could move to West Village at age 22 and live there until you’re 80,” Posch said. “It’s welcoming, it’s diverse, it’s got everything it needs. It just doesn’t have the gay people. At least not a lot.”

If nothing else, the area takes its name from New York City's storied neighborhood of the same name.

Posch also suggested that some city administrations had been unwelcoming to the gay community in the past, and said that current municipal leaders could at the very least be more vocal in their support for Detroit's LGBT population.

“Really it just needs to be part of the conversation,” he said.