Stuff Gay People Like: Pretending Not To Be Poor

There are a number of advantages to being gay. ONE: being in a relationship doubles your wardrobe. TWO: along with black and Latino people, you are automatically assumed to be a good dancer. THREE: you have an excellent ability to keep together while hung over. It is a short list, true, but these are clearly very special things.

Admittedly there are downsides to being gay, too. Towns of less than 100,000 people are so culturally hostile to gay people that gay folks who grew up there must flee to an urban area – yes, an inconvenience for them. Many young gay people risk painful rejection from families – but what teenager doesn’t have angst? Two thirds of all Republicans think you should not be allowed to marry, adopt, teach or work with children, and half of the time they win – but at least nobody stops you from owning pets, right? Except your landlord. If you get fired from your job, you can never really be sure it wasn’t because you’re gay – but hey, there’s always retail.

And all the sweet drinks cost at least 8 dollars a pop!

But both those lists, good and bad, are overshadowed in impact by the one greatest thing about being gay: gay people are rich!

Because they have no children or attachments, gay men are free to accumulate disposable income and have no distractions from pursuing powerful high-paying jobs. They pretty much control the fashion, entertainment and food industries. Straight people are not even allowed to work there anymore.

Er…

Sort of like when anti-Semitic people claim Jewish people are all millionaires who control world governments, society assumes gay people are wealthy. This view is helpful in making it seem less dickish to pick on gay guys.

But gay people also like to pretend they are rich. No matter how much or how little money we actually have, we do like to look like we have it. Our (stereotypical) infatuation with expensive brand name clothing and apparel is just the tip of that iceberg.

There’s a law of physics stating that whenever a gay person likes something, its cost increases exponentially. Land values in gay neighborhoods are always rising in well-documented trends; iPhones and Macs are ridiculously overpriced, and the gayest TV shows are always on HBO or expanded cable.

And a serious note: what’s painfully true for many of us is that we aren’t rich. A lot of us are poor. I (at the time of writing this) am poor. My friends are poor. A lot of us who are in college or just graduated are poor enough to get food stamps if we were to apply.

And I can’t even express the lengths me and my friends will go to look like we aren’t poor. We live in apartment buildings where over two-thirds of our incomes go to rent, and we apologize profusely when giving friends lifts in our p.o.s. cars insisting we’re ready to dump the thing. I have friends who admit they work in retail because of the access to discounts on expensive clothing, deciding that the lower pay is worth it because the money was always going to go to clothes anyway.

One thing I loved about the film Milk was its referencing of a time when gay people were a bohemian underclass, rising for rights as a working-class populist movement. The spirit of the Stonewall Riots lived on then, with its outward and vocal civil (and sometimes uncivil) disobedience. Looking back at a time that was before I was born, it is easy for me to connect the movement with similar American struggles fought by labor, women, blacks, Latinos and countless other groups which faced the intersectionality of classism and other kinds of prejudice.

I don’t have any doubt that there aren’t just as many poor gay, lesbian and transgendered individuals working in America’s cities in situations that make it tough to get by, especially in the current economy; queer people of color and people with HIV also face prejudices and struggles that slice at them from multiple directions and continue to be invisible to mainstream America. But poor gays are no longer such a vocal voice in the movement. Many of the cultural authorities in the LGBT media preach affluence, style and careerism, conveyed through suit-and-tie fundraisers and fashion pages detailing “the ten best Armani suitcases of 2009.” We’re creating brand new systems of social hierarchy within a scene that should rather be defined by common struggles for acceptance.

It makes me wonder how many of us who are more successful are still aware of those who experience homophobia differently from poverty – where “marriage” may not be as important as safe housing and protection from violence – and how much we as a community are dissolving, the closer we come to full citizenship.

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL: ABOUT) is a regular column. Visit the Facebook Page.