People look for a lot of things on Craigslist: freelance jobs, used furniture, plumbers, carpooling buddies, etc. One of those categories is what I’ll generally describe as “companionship.” The personals section on Craigslist contains several different subdirectories (e.g., strictly platonic, misc romance, casual encounters). There are also just the good old fashioned combinations of women and men seeking each other. I analyzed just these four (women for women, women for men, men for women, and men for men) by summing the number of listings over one week for several cities across the US. The graph breaks down each city’s ads into the percentages from each category.
In most of the cities, ads for men seeking men make up the majority of listings; this is led by Los Angeles, where close to 70% are in this category. In Birmingham, AL, (where they love the governor) only 45% of the ads are for men seeking men.
Data source: http://www.craigslist.org/