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Avid followers of City Insider know we love to see how San Francisco stacks up against other cities in meaningless compilations of random statistics. But sometimes we have to call out these list compilers for being just, well, wrong.

Take The Advocate magazine and its new list, “Gayest Cities in America.” Where would you expect to find San Francisco? We suspect it’s not at No. 11 sandwiched between St. Louis and Cleveland.

But that’s indeed where San Francisco – described as “the gay daddy of American cities” and “gentrifying, but still scrappy” – winds up. The gayest city of all? Minneapolis. Yes, Minneapolis. Followed by Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Orlando and Pittsburgh.

Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents the Castro, isn’t buying the list either. “It’s good to have competition. It’s good to have options,” he said. “But this is pretty much the mothership.”

We’re no mathematicians (in fact, we barely passed college statistics), but The Advocate’s formula seems a bit suspect. It adds up the city’s number of gay.com profiles, gay wedding officiants, openly gay elected officials, Tegan and Sara performances over the past five years, lesbian bars and Yellow Pages entries with the word gay in them. It then divides the total by the city’s population and then multiplies that by 100,000. Got it?

San Francisco winds up with a measley 18.6. First quibble: San Francisco has far more than two gay wedding officiants as The Advocate says. How would two people have married 4,000 same-sex couples within weeks back in 2004? Hmmm? And more to the point, the formula penalizes big cities. After all, New York City and Los Angeles don’t even make the list.

There, we feel better now.