Creative Commons/Ludovic Bertron

Updated 9:03 a.m., June 23, 2011.

More than 34,000 gay and lesbian couples are living in married or unmarried partnerships in the Bay Area, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. There are approximately 18,200 gay couples and nearly 16,000 lesbian couples in the region, the census found.

The data represents the first time the federal government has systematically tallied the number of same-sex households.

Approximately 30 percent of California's same-sex households are in the Bay Area, the census reported, while the region represents only 20 percent of the state's population.

The census did not ask residents to provide their sexual orientation, but instead asked them to relate their gender and their relationship to other people with whom they live.

San Francisco still a gay center

San Francisco continues to be home to the Bay Area's largest concentration of gay men. 

Gay households in Bay Area counties:

Couples not just in the Castro

More than 7,600 male same-sex couples live in San Francisco, the data shows — nearly half the region's total.

But only about 1,000 of those gay couples live in the Castro and Duboce Triangle, according to the census. The rest live in neighborhoods across the city.

Gary Gates, a senior fellow at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA, said the census figures make sense in context. "Gay men are much less likely than straights to couple," he said. "It's only half of gay men, and that's even lower in San Francisco."

Jim Gibson, who recently separated from his same-sex partner, was surprised to hear that there weren't more gay couples in the city. "I’ve lived in San Francisco for 20 years," he said. "Most people in my social group are coupled up."

Gay households in San Francisco:

There is no Castro for lesbian couples

No single city laid claim to more than 20 percent of the region's lesbian couples, the census data showed. The census found 6,400 female same-sex couples living in the East Bay (including 2,000 in Oakland), 2,700 in San Francisco, 1,400 in Sonoma County and 1,200 in San Jose.

"Oakland has been seen over and over again as the lesbian capital of the world, so I would have expected the numbers to be greater in Oakland," said Andrea Shorter, marriage and coalitions director for the gay-rights group Equality California, who helped design census outreach activities in the Bay Area.

Lesbian households in Bay Area counties:

Lesbian couples more likely to have children

More than half of all households in the region headed by female same-sex couples included children, compared to only 20 percent of homes led by male same-sex couples. Across the Bay Area, more than 8,600 same-sex households headed by women included children, compared to fewer than 4,000 headed by men. (In San Francisco, only 6 percent of households headed by gay men included children).

Lesbian couples in San Francisco are less likely to have children than elsewhere: 60 percent of lesbian couples in Santa Clara County lived with children, compared to just 30 percent in San Francisco.

Lesbian households in San Francisco: