Gay magazine The Advocate used its own formula to assemble a list of the most homotastic cities in America and published the results today. You may be shocked by which city is the gayest, and which ones don't even rank.

Why are people so bad at making these lists? For starters, New York City isn't even on the list! How are you going to come up with a list of the gayest cities in American and not even have New York on it? This is where Stonewall is. We have more discarded bottles of poppers floating around in our sewers than Denver has on its shelves. Yeah, Denver is on the list.

How did this happen? Well, the article—written by our old friend Mike Albo—used some strange arithmetic to figure out which city was the gayest. For each city, the mag added up the number of Gay.com profiles (what is this? 2003?), the number of listed officiants for gay weddings within 50 miles, elected openly gay officials, Tegan and Sara performances over the past five years (ha!), lesbian bars, gay-friendly religious congregations, entries on YellowPages.com with "gay" in the business description (what is this? 1973?) and then added it all up. Then they divided that by the population within the city limits.

So which city came out on top? Minneapolis. Yup, the home of Prince and cold weather. Neither of those things are necessarily gay. So this means Minneapolis is gayer than New York? Number 2 on the list is Santa Fe. The only thing that is gay about Santa Fe is that they have all those Western blankets lying around. Oh, and Tom Ford lives there, so we guess he just waved his open shirt around and covered the whole town in his sweaty man musk and now it's gayer than Cristiano Ronaldo's underwear drawer. Rounding out the top five: Las Vegas (which has more fake boobs than homosexuals); Orlando (fine, that place is totally gay); and Pittsburgh (just because Queer As Folk was set there doesn't make it gay!).

And that's not even the worst of it. The top 15 includes places like St. Louis, which deserves some consideration given it's the hometown of America's gayest homosexual, Mr. Andy Cohen, but still isn't gayer than New York. And a place called "Vancouver, Washington," is on the list, too. We're pretty sure that is a fictional location.

What are we New Yorkers going to do to redeem our image? Are we going to have to get Liza Minnelli to pave Broadway in glitter? Do we have to light up the Empire State Building in Manhunt's distinctive blue and orange? Does Michael Musto have to put on Lady Gaga's meat dress every day of the week? What does a city have to do to get on this list? We need to know!

[The Advocate, photo from NYC's Gay Pride parade via seeminglee/Flickr]