What's living in Indianapolis like?

November 30, 2015 7:22 PM

I can work from anywhere, and I'm considering a move to Indianapolis. I have a few good reasons for doing so, but I'm not sure if it's a place that I'd be happy as a single, introverted 30ish femme lesbian. If you're at all like me, please let me know what it's like to live there!

I've seen this previous question from 2012 but am interested in hearing about gay culture and some more up to date info.

I'm over Seattle, where the rent has gotten high and where friends are really hard to find. Dating here has been 'meh'. I'd like to find somewhere I could spend a few years or even much longer and build a social group and save some money. I'm considering Indianapolis for a few reasons:

- My best friend and her husband live there, and have a wide social circle that I can tap into. I'd have a good support network right off the bat.
- People seem more welcoming and not pretentious, though that might be the chip on my shoulder from living in the frosty PNW for so long.
- The rent is so cheap! And so is real estate! For a real house with a backyard for my dog to play in!
- It's close(r) to relatives and close friends in Michigan and Illinois, close enough to Chicago, and I hear there are beautiful places to visit in Kentucky not too far away.
- The weather is tolerable, I've visited in every season and it's fine.
- I'm less terrified of tornadoes than I am of Seattle's inevitable major earthquake, any other natural disasters to worry about?
- The food culture seems fantastic! (And prices seem so reasonable to me.)
- It makes some work stuff easier, since most of my clients are on the East coast.

With those pros in mind, can you help me consider the drawbacks? I'm especially keen to hear from other queer women. I know a couple gay men in Indy and have heard from them that it's a great place to live, but they admitted that they know very few lesbians. I'm already worried enough about being alone forever, and after perusing what seemed like very slim-pickings for women I find attractive (political, witty, masculine of center) on OKCupid in Indy that worry skyrocketed.

My other worry is that coming from a "cool" city that I'll feel bored out my mind. I moved from Seattle to Grand Rapids, MI to be closer to family about five years ago and it ended up being too small for me. I recognize that could be an attitude problem and I'm willing to work harder this time around!

posted by snail dog smile to Home & Garden (9 answers total)

Best answer: I'm queer, I live in Indianapolis, and I would gtfo in a heartbeat if I could. We were the last state to actively try to pass anti-marriage equality laws-- one of our couples was one of the parties that ended up sending it to the Supreme Court for its final disposition on the matter, when the law was overturned in the circuit.

We have a queer community; it's small and embattled. We just spent years fighting the state to let us put our (only) queer youth group on our license plates (already allowed: multiple a anti-choice groups.) Our state is the one that embarrassed itself completely this summer by passing a law to allow businesses to discriminate against queer patrons. (This law has not been repealed, although it was modified in a completely meaningless way.)

Since that went so well, our representatives are currently talking about trying to strip queer couples of the ability to foster or adopt children. My wife is transgender and transitioning at what should be a traditionally safe workplace. She's having to go through back channels, and bind at work, because the workplace has no official policy on transgender employees.

The state does not protect gender identity; sexual orientation is technically included in our EEOE laws, but this is also a right-to-work state. They can fire your ass for looking funny, and it's not a particularly warm environment for someone to press a discrimination lawsuit and win.

Our queer bar scene feels very 80s, because all of the bars we have, have been here since the 80s. There's the 501, that still masquerades as a package liquor store-- with no windows, and a guard at the front door-- there's The Metro, which has been a lesbian fern bar for as long as I can remember, Talbott Street, which is a drag bar, Downtown Olly's, which is your mecca for gay jocks, and Greg's, which is a cruise club. Like I said, it may as well be the 80s here.

Please be careful Googling queer establishments online, because a few places will be listed as gay establishments, but aren't really. (Case in point, The Vogue. It's a small club venue in Broad Ripple. Broad Ripple used to be the "indie" part of town, with our only lesbian/feminist bookstore-- but the bookstore is gone, and BR is now upscale moneyville. You probably wouldn't get beaten up for kissing your girlfriend at The Vogue, but it's certainly not a queer space in any meaningful way.)

There's not much in the way of the rainbow directory or gay pages here. It can be difficult to find doctors and other professionals who are willing to brand themselves as queer-friendly or queer themselves. There are not a shitton of resources for queer people to be had, but that's largely in part because Indianapolis doesn't have a shitton of resources for anybody to have. A large percentage of the available social resources are church-based, and not in a Unitarian, everybody is welcome, kind of way. One of the major hospital anchors in town is St. Francis, which is Catholic, and has in the past, reserved the right not to serve queer patients outside of their ERs.

There are only a couple of queer sports associations in town, several of them church-based. And in my experience, the streams do not cross. Gay men's sports are completely separate from lesbian sports; if you want to play softball, you will do it on a lesbian league.

Aside from that, yes, the cost of living is pretty low. We're starting to get some decent restaurants. However, unless you live on the rich side of town, nothing delivers except for pizza and sometimes Chinese. We don't, as a rule, tend to get major musical acts on their first tours-- you have to go to Chicago (4 hours north) or Cincinnati (2 hours east.) If you like Broadway, you can catch touring companies down in Bloomington (2 hours south) or at Cloewes Theatre downtown, but do not expect to see anything recent any time soon. The theatre community is small but vibrant, so we have that going for us, I reckon.

Our weather is not temperate. You can sometimes get patches of super nice 70 degree beauty. However, you also get tornadoes, flash floods, straight-line winds, hail, blizzards and ice storms. Last January, the city was effectively shut down for two weeks because of temperatures that were consistently in the -10 real -40 wind chill range. Winter and spring can be incredibly volatile here, though our summers can be pretty nice if you're into 90+ degree temperatures and humidity.

Biking is only starting to become a viable transportation option in Indianapolis, but the streets are not well-marked, and car traffic is not used to bikes in the streets. Downtown is walkable, but many of the suburbs are not. (It was a super big deal a couple of years ago when the mayor started a project to actually put sidewalks into many Indianapolis neighborhoods. I would say that sidewalks are still the exception and not the rule.) Once in the suburbs, everything is very far apart, so you really need a car.

Our public transportation is spotty and slow (the 38th Street regular bus comes every hour and a half, and it's the most popular line,) you cannot rely on it for transportation unless you want to go from a suburb into downtown Indianapolis and back. I live about 20 minutes from downtown by car, but it used to take my daughter 3.5 hours to take the bus from our house to her college downtown.

Our airport is about 15 minutes outside of town, and it is not a hub. It can be expensive to get flights into and out of Indianapolis because of this. You're most likely to end up on Delta, and depending on where you're going, you will have a layover either in Detroit, Atlanta or Dallas.

Finally (for this post, but it's by no means exhaustive,) we have Blue Laws-- so you cannot buy liquor on Sundays or on poll days. Many stores still roll up their sidewalks at 8pm (during the week, there aren't a ton of restaurant options after 10pm, for example.) However, in the summer, our produce is the bomb and there are tons of farmer's markets and City Market. If you like shopping at places like Whole Foods or Trader Joes, be aware that you're going to have to drive 30-40 minutes north into Castleton and Carmel to get to one.

The rent is cheap, we're currently on EST Daylight Savings Time, but they are talking about changing that again (we only got DST a few years ago; before that, we were EST summer, CST winter.) We have a cool Children's Museum that's not just for children, and our State Fair is pretty kick ass. People are welcoming-ish. I would be wary of outing yourself to people who are not already in a queer social circle. We finally have an actual Pride festival, which has been a long time in coming

I've been queer my whole life and lived here my whole life, so I'm sure familiarity breeds some contempt. But even objectively, Indiana isn't a queer-friendly place to live. Coming from a coastal city used to actual city amenities, I think you might find Indianapolis sorely lacking.
posted by headspace at 3:51 AM on December 1, 2015 [11 favorites]

Best answer: I used to live in Indianapolis and came here to say pretty much everything headspace did. It's like the place where the cultural Mason Dixon line starts and I would never move back there. It's a big city that feels like a small, conservative town but without any community. I've also lived in Grand Rapids and vastly preferred Grand Rapids to Indianapolis. Conservative and small as Grand Rapids is, it's much more liberal and interesting than Indianapolis.
posted by Polychrome at 5:38 AM on December 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

The biggest difference aside from culture is that (from what I recall) downtown Indianapolis is mostly abandoned like most downtowns in the midwest. So your culture shock may come from realizing you're going to by driving to strip malls instead of strolling through charming urban neighborhoods.

You might want to consider Columbus, Ohio if the midwest is your destination. It's booming like crazy right now by all reports. Or if you can stand horrible endless winters that grind away at your will to live, come to Chicago. We have a large public gay community here and the population is big enough that you'd have a larger dating pool.
posted by deathpanels at 6:06 AM on December 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

The main center of downtown is doing quite well and has been improving in recent years. However, outside the center mile or so, things in Marion County are admittedly a bit iffy. Sure, some parts are in good condition, but a lot of it not so much.

Being a hetero cis-male, I can't really say anything on the gay side. Certainly it is a conservative area, but I'd like to think that most people are at least welcoming here.
posted by RyanAdams at 6:31 AM on December 1, 2015

Or come to Nashville. Five hours' drive from Indy. Ninety minute flight to Chicago. One time zone removed from your East Coast clients. More welcoming, culturally. Better weather than Indy.
posted by John Borrowman at 9:13 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Cincinnati is about a 2-hour drive from Indy and we are WAY more gay-friendly (including lesbian-friendly, from what my lesbian friends have told me). I grew up just outside Indy and still have lots of friends there, so I do know what it's like now.

If you come to Cincinnati, you'll find all the things you like about Indy, minus your best friend and her husband. But there are more gay bars here, a better food scene, and more neighborhoods that would be incredibly welcoming (Over-the-Rhine, Northside, Clifton, and Oakley/Norwood come to mind right away). Our gay pride parade is HUGE and is totally supported by the major employers in the city (like Fortune 500 company P&G). Our food scene, as I said, is spectacular. We have a symphony orchestra, a pops orchestra, ballet, Shakespeare company, several theatres (including one that hosts Broadway Across America shows - Book of Mormon is coming again in March!), really nice museums, opera...we've got it all and the cost of living is fantastic.

If you want to visit, I could arrange a MeFi Meetup and we can all talk you into moving here! Really, it's a nice city, up-and-coming public transport (the streetcar had a trial run today! So exciting!), bikeable, we have lots of walking trails, our public parks are amazing...I could go on and on.

MeMail me if you want to know more!
posted by cooker girl at 11:54 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ooh and Cincy is usually about an hour and a half drive, now that they niced up 1-74! I love driving to Cincy!
posted by headspace at 3:58 PM on December 1, 2015

Best answer: I am a hetero-cis male but after living just north of Indianapolis for seven years, I wouldn't recommend moving here. I've never gotten the feeling it was an overly friendly place for any members of the LGTBQ community. My friend and her girlfriend certainly weren't thrilled about the place.
posted by Silvertree at 12:37 PM on December 2, 2015

Response by poster: Thank you all so much! Reading the answers led me to drooling over beautiful apartments in Cincinnati and adding that to my list of "places to visit really soon" while seriously reconsidering Indy. As in, I'm no longer considering it. (cooker girl, will definitely MeMail you for more info and a possible meetup if I can make it happen!)

It was immensely helpful to hear everyone's perspectives since my best friend and her husband LOVE Indianapolis and have shown me the best parts of it during my handful of visits, but had zero ideas what it'd be like for a single gay lady and also have their own (pure-hearted yet) selfish interest in convincing me to move.
posted by snail dog smile at 3:26 PM on December 2, 2015