LGBT
Related: About this forumThe Myth of Gay Affluence
by NATHAN MCDERMOTT
Who are Americas gays? To hear it as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have it, gays are a privileged set, living it up in cities across the country. As the justice wrote in his dissent to Romer v. Evansa landmark 1996 case that overturned a Colorado state constitutional amendment prohibiting legal protections for gays and lesbiansThose who engage in homosexual conduct tend to reside in disproportionate numbers in certain communities. Even more ominously, to Scalia, they have "high disposable income," which gives them "disproportionate political power
to [achieve] not merely a grudging social toleration, but full social acceptance, of homosexuality.
The pernicious insinuationthat gays and lesbians are one the wealthiest demographics in the countryisnt a new cliché. Some of the most ingrained public images of LGBT people are their cosmopolitan, highfalutin lifestyle; gays, so the story goes, live in gentrified urban neighborhoods like The Castro in San Francisco or Chelsea in New York, eat artisanal cheese, and drink $12 cocktails.
But like most stereotypes, the myth of gay affluence is greatly exaggerated.
In reality, gay Americans face disproportionately greater economic challenges than their straight counterparts. A new report released by UCLAs Williams Institute found that 29 percent of LGBT adults, approximately 2.4 million people, experienced food insecuritya time when they did not have enough money to feed themselves or their familyin the past year. In contrast, 16 percent of Americans nationwide reported being food insecure in 2012. One in 5 gays and lesbians aged 18-44 received food stamps in the last year, compared with just over 1 in 4 same sex couples raising children. The LGBT community has made huge political strides over the past decade, but in economic matters they still lag far behind the rest of the country.
I think we have this sense, borrowing from the campaign, that it gets better, Gary Gates, a law professor and the author of the Williams Institutes report, told me. And thats true: It is getting better, but its not getting better everywhere all the time. Things in rural Alabama look very different from Seattle, and as more LGBT people come out, they are disproportionately more likely to come out in Alabama than Seattle.
more
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-gay-affluence/284570/
MADem
(135,425 posts)pinto
(106,886 posts)nightscanner59
(802 posts)And subject to a lot of bullying in the redneck community I ran away from at 16, dumpster diving for food was preferable to that. Yet coming from way behind was no way to start a college carreer. Now add to that the loss of two good paying jobs directly attributable to "getting rid of that gay fag" by two sets of new management...
I can certainly attest that my holdings are far less than glorious even after a number of years in my carreer. Paying exhorbitant interest rates to buy two lemon cars (thank you very f'n much Dodge and Volkswagen for not standing behind your products and defaulting to your teams of lawyers to countersue me rather than just do the honorable thing and fix your products) didn't help.
The bar is raised so high, systematically, for someone without financial backing that despite more "disposable income"... the big corp's got all that.
Jesus Malverde
(10,274 posts)Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and transgender all have different economic dynamics and varying economic discrimination or acceptance.
Treating them all the same from an economic perspective ignores reality.