1. That assumes you have the money to move, can land in a new city and find housing, and then find a job. Pre-internet this was absolutely nontrivial.
2. It's not 380,000 towns on this planet, in the 80's/90's it was just a handful of cities that were more evolved, like San Francisco or P Town. There's a reason those cities are so LGBTQ heavy.
Now we play it safe. We save money. We find an apartment, a job and then we move. We live comfortably now and we don't want to lose that when moving. You can even see it today with people from certain parts of the world. They leave with nothing else than maybe a 20 dollar phone hoping they'll be able to call their family once they get somewhere.
RuPaul is correct when she says queer people create their own family. Even today.
I gave an example of how some people move to another country with only a 20 dollar phone. I could've said with 20 dollars in their pockets or with a couple t-shirts in a bag.
You're supposed to be smart people and...nevermind, I deleted what I wrote because it's not worth it. It's increasingly difficult to talk to leftists on the internet, they take the most meaningless comment as an attack or a literal fact and they they try to downvote you or argue stupid things. Not worth my time.
(1) is true, but I was thinking more about the persecution aspect than the community aspect. If being gay made life unbearable in a particular town, it was at least physically possible, if expensive, for a person to cross state-lines and start life fresh. Today people leave a trail that follows them globally and for a lifetime.
In terms of community, (2) is a little more bleak than the reality. I'm guessing in the 1980s, most college towns had at least a gay bar (or cafe, bookshop, whatever), and community formed around it.
In the 1980s? Only the major metros really.
The history of drag balls and specially the category of business executive is a great example of how the only access to so many professions was performative art and impersonation (& still is especially for POC, non normative gender, trans etc)