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n2doc

(47,953 posts)
Fri Mar 21, 2014, 01:39 PM Mar 2014

The Myth of Gay Affluence

by NATHAN MCDERMOTT

Who are America’s 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. Evans—a landmark 1996 case that overturned a Colorado state constitutional amendment prohibiting legal protections for gays and lesbians—“Those 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 insinuation—that gays and lesbians are one the wealthiest demographics in the country—isn’t 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 UCLA’s Williams Institute found that 29 percent of LGBT adults, approximately 2.4 million people, experienced food insecurity—a time when they did not have enough money to feed themselves or their family—in 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 Institute’s report, told me. “And that’s true: It is getting better, but it’s 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/

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The Myth of Gay Affluence (Original Post) n2doc Mar 2014 OP
That's a very good article--lots of information in it. nt MADem Mar 2014 #1
Good piece. Thanks for the post. pinto Mar 2014 #2
Speaking as one who started out homeless because I am gay nightscanner59 Mar 2014 #3
This is one case where the monolithic LGBT community falls apart. Jesus Malverde Mar 2014 #4

nightscanner59

(802 posts)
3. Speaking as one who started out homeless because I am gay
Sun Mar 23, 2014, 08:24 AM
Mar 2014

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)
4. This is one case where the monolithic LGBT community falls apart.
Tue Mar 25, 2014, 08:07 AM
Mar 2014

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.

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