Travel book to highlight Salt Lake as 'gay-friendly place to live'

Salt Lake City will be highlighted as a "gay-friendly place to live" in an upcoming travel book, an unexpected inclusion in the volume that will be released this month.

"It's not what people expect. Many of us have this preconceived notion of what it's like to live in Salt Lake because of the church," said Gregory A. Kompes, author of "50 Fabulous Gay-friendly Places to Live." "But when you start meeting people and talking to people it's just this big umbrella that isn't reality."

Kompes was so impressed by Salt Lake City's gay community that he fought to keep the city on the list, finally compromising with his publisher to include Utah's capital city as a bonus 51st entry. His publisher simply could not reconcile the idea of Salt Lake City as a gay-friendly community because of the predominant Latter-day Saint religion and Utah's reputation as a Republican state, he said.

"This may be a shock to many, but when big city cosmopolitan meets rugged adventure in this clean, safe and beautiful city, Salt Lake City has become home to a large, organized and politically supported gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community," Kompes writes in the book, published by Career Press.

Kompes based his criteria for the 51 cities on factors including nightlife, employment opportunities, local politics and gay-owned business. Salt Lake City, he said, impressed him with its support of the gay community with an active Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Community Center and an annual Utah Pride parade in downtown Salt Lake City.

Efforts by Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson to extend health insurance benefits to city employees were also a major factor in listing Salt Lake City in the book, Kompes said.

"Just the fact that there was someone in such a high position fighting for equality for gay people made me take a second look at the community," he said. "Those things stuck out and drew me in to learning more about Utah."

Anderson signed an executive order in September providing benefits to domestic partners of city employees, including gay and lesbian partners. Measures like that have brought attention to Salt Lake City and changed the perception of the city as wholly conservative, Anderson said.

"I think there is a misconception about Salt Lake. A lot of it is just long-term perceptions people have had about this place," he said. "But Salt Lake City is changing dramatically; we're far more diverse than anybody outside of Utah would ever dream. We're a lot more diverse than people in our own city realize."