I mean Chicago is pretty darn gay and loud about it if you ask me. Hell there's at least 3 predominantly lgbt neighborhoods and Chicagoans aren't afraid to speak up either, so I'd say it's feasible this could have happened.
I will say, emote sizes don't seem to scale properly on different lemmy instances; for example, lemmygrad emotes here are super huge whereas I've seen lemmygrad folks say hexbear emotes are huge.
I wonder if that's a genuine lemmy federation issue