Queercents

Last Sunday was the series finale of the beloved lesbian Showtime drama The L Word. Whether you loved it or hated it, each week these ladies brought some real stories of life and love into our living room and even passed along some money lessons along the way.

Here at Queercents, I have written about some of these money lessons like Helena and the lifestyle trap and Alice and Tasha moving in together. Nina has written about it as well through the years including “Million Dollar Bets about Kelly McGillis” and “Helena, The L Word, and The M Word” just to name a few.

Well the series finale had its share of money lessons as well. Two in particular stand out to me. Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade to a premium online dating service. The main value of a paid dating site is that you’re meeting people who are financially motivated (by membership costs) to find a serious relationship, or at least date. There are also other features like compatibility matching or safety features. Here’s how to get the most bang for your buck.

Do the research. Check with the Better Business Bureau and read complaints if you can find them. You can also email the sites about their success rate, though be prepared to take their answers with a grain of salt. Alexa traffic is another great resource that lest you see how many hits a particular site gets. There are a lot of sites for gay dating out there that just don’t get much traffic. Primarily straight dating sites may do well on traffic but have very few gay subscribers, so make sure there’s enough singles for you to date. If you can’t tell with a basic search, email their customer service.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Episode 11 of The L Word, we get a short but powerful glimpse into money and relationships. As Tasha and Alice start house and apartment hunting it becomes quite clear that communication and an understanding of each other’s money styles is lacking. To make matters worse I’m not so sure they share the same values. We’ve seen on the show recently what kind of havoc not sharing the same values can have on individuals and relationships.

True to form, Alice has Tasha marching all over town looking at really nice houses. Fancy, beautiful pieces of lodging that would be quite the gem to live in. Knowing that they are in the Greater Los Angeles Area tells us that these little gems are a fortune. The only problem is that it is way outside their budget. Alice is hot on the heels of what could be a lucrative career in television so she is riding high. She is ready to jump right in, become house poor, and then end up on the California foreclosure heap in Season 6 I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

“Our similarities bring us to a common ground; our differences allow us to be fascinated by each other.” – Tom Robbins

A more accurate title might have been Sleeping With Money: Don’t Date Single Parents, but obviously soccer mom is a better descriptive to get clicks on this post. After all, you’re reading it. I rest my case.

Anyway, Amanda was loosely classified as a soccer mom. Technically speaking, she’d have to be a married housewife. She wasn’t. She was separated from her husband. But she was a mom and until our fling, I had never dated a mother before. Never again.

Much like Aundi’s revelation about the cost of dating a straight woman, there’s a price you’ll pay dating a single parent. First, you’ll never be her priority. Her child or children come first. End of story. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter what letter of LGBT you are, sometimes you and your sweetheart need a little mood music for those sexy times. Don’t bother buying lame CD compilations targeted for a “lovers’ night”: those work like a cold shower. Talk about a waste of money!

I have a better idea. DListed.com (via Gawker) introduced me to this list of the “50 Gayest Songs of All Time” compiled by Inside Out Australia to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Why not download them from any of your favorite music retailers for .99¢ each?

You’ll have gems in your playlist such as “Your Disco Needs You.” (Had some trouble posting the video here, so here’s the link to it.

To those of you who have all of these songs on your iPod, just keep being sexy I guess…

I’m sleeping with a straight. Well, okay, like my former lover in San Francisco wrote to me in an email recently: “Newsflash, if she’s sleeping with you, she’s not so straight.” And, to everyone’s surprise, it turns out that she’s not. My point, however, is not to graph an unhelpful hierarchy of straightness for this post. It’s to talk about my recent bout with homophobia. My own homophobia.

I’ve never really been into public displays of affection. Some might argue that this is a tactic often used to keep options open, but I’m genuinely not into it. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s annoying and dramatic. I didn’t enjoy it when I lived in what I call the “vacuum” queer communities like Seattle’s Capital Hill, or various San Francisco neighborhoods, or West Hollywood, places where one can almost forget that straights still rule most of the world. So, the fact that I still don’t like PDA can’t be entirely attributed to the fact that my present home is a small city with a nearly invisible and geographically scattered queer community in which I’m generally the only visibly queer person around. I simply just haven’t changed.

My new lover, however, is obsessed with her newfound identity. She wants to make-out in inconvenient places, to hold hands and other parts everywhere, to embrace in the grocery store. It’s not my thing, but I have to admit that my discomfort has alerted me to something else that’s going on. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s plenty of information about making business travel better. You can even find ways to bring your partner along as Paula mentioned, or ways to tack on vacation time for you and your sweetheart to enjoy as Nina pointed out.

But in a two-income household, one partner usually has other obligations that keep him or her at home. So what about those of us stuck with the eerie stillness of an empty house and only a cold pillow to clutch in the middle of the night? Where are our handy tips for survival?

Scour the web on this subject and you’ll only find words to feed a lovesick song, much like the ones provided by yours truly above. But there’s no need to be a drama queen about it. Time away from your traveling partner can be quite manageable as long as you keep busy and create the right dose of absence — which truly does make the heart grow fonder — as I’ve learned with my partner Zac, who is an academic and often has to take off for conferences.

Here is a list of 6 out-of-the-ordinary and frugal things I do while he’s away that keeps me happy and our relationship healthy: Read the rest of this entry »

“The doer alone learneth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

I never liked being single. Sure, I always tried to thrive during my alone time and often referred to this period as: The Year of Nina. Obviously, there was more than just one year of Nina. It was usually the year or two between my longer term relationships. Or the year I came out of the closet. That was some Year of Nina!

But not all of the years were fabulous. I recall one particular Valentine’s Day during my late twenties in between Partner #1 and Partner #2 when I wasn’t quite thriving. I was self-employed and basically broke. I had left a stable career, started a business (a product called The Paper Salad – what was I thinking??), depleted my savings and was now working as many demeaning service jobs at night just to afford my rent, car payment and health insurance. And I was alone.

No one to lean on. No one to love me. It definitely felt like a low point in life. I was living in Connecticut… far away from my family in Ohio. I don’t think any of them realized how challenging my circumstances were at the time. Until the box arrived from my oldest sister… Read the rest of this entry »

In traditional marriages, there is often a give and take between man and wife regarding whose career takes priority at any given time. More often than not, especially historically, it was often the man’s career that took precedence and the wife would often relocate and change/leave jobs for the good of the family unit and the betterment of the husband. While this is shifting even in heterosexual marriages, there are no real rules of the road for LGBT couples.

This weekend Kim and I celebrate our 16th anniversary of being together. Around 14 years ago we were faced with a relationship ending decision. You see, we were both young and just out of college and had juggled the emotions of coming out (to ourselves and others), our first full time jobs, and a long distance relationship. The whole travel I-78 thing every weekend and having to separate in the wee hours of Monday morning to make the return commute was growing old and dramatic. She wasn’t out to her parents at the time and we were attempting to build some sort of relationship foundation and future.

The question became – are you willing to give up your job to make the move? Read the rest of this entry »

An education bug is hitting Queercents. Moorea is considering beauty school. Jan has started massage therapy school. I’m now back in school to get my certification in web production and multimedia.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of grad school for quite some time, until finally deciding that I’d like to be in an MFA program three years from now. The rub: I had to figure out how I was going to earn money in the meantime. I certainly did not want to go back to working as a litigation paralegal. The job was wrecking my health, values, sanity — you name it, the job defiled it. I was the wrong guy for the job.

There weren’t many other options left for a guy with a psych B.A., many years of legal experience and general burnout. Rather than be lost and miserable, I decided that I must go further with my vow of creativity in order to have a satisfying career. A brief certification program through my local community college was the most affordable and pleasing choice to get a new set of skills. Of course, I had to take into consideration how this all affects my partner. Read the rest of this entry »