I don't have any statistics, but there may well be fewer brick-and-mortar gay hang-outs today, precisely because the internet has given people other ways to meet.
I'll settle at more than your 'major metros' and fewer than my 'most college towns' — although now that I think those two numbers over, it's probably not that large a delta to begin with ;)
To be totally fair I never said "handful of cities", but instead "major metros". My point is that the presence of a college is not a good predictor for the presence of a gay bar. It's very much a large metro thing.
