Is the economy having a different effect on queers?
Last month, Crack Magazine in the UK, included a column by Gareth Longstaff explaining why frugality in the current financial meltdown is a very straight and family bound thing and having a different effect on queers:
If we turn on any news channel or open any newspaper we see somewhere this implicit sense of gloom and the emphasis on the credit crunch and all of its depressing implications. But using a queer pair of eyes, the thing that I seem to have noticed is that this sense of austerity and cutting back on the pleasures we all indulge in has manifested itself as a very straight and family bound thing.
Queer is hard to locate and define and whilst some of us have children, more of us do not. We do not live with the social ties and responsibilities that other strands of society do and as a result lots of queer identities are still articulating and realising their pleasures and desires in this so called economic down-turn.
Get yourself to any gay bar on any night of the week and they are still packed to the rafters with people who want to spend their wages or loan on forgetting the sometimes quite bleak reality of life in 2009. The stereotypical image of gay hedonistic pleasure still in some ways rings true and recently it seems to be getting more and more obvious; queers just seem to be very good at having more fun in times of recession and cutting back.
He concludes (after quoting Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton) that if we all lack funds, then living beyond our means is perhaps ‘œthe best and of course the queerest thing to do.’
I’d argue that this feeds the cliché of the young gay man using money (more precisely, credit!) to buy self-esteem. Years ago, a twenty-something gay guy in Houston wrote a guest post at Queercents:
Like many of my friends, I have spent most of my Friday – Saturday – Sunday nights partying, clubbing, dancing, drinking, and wasting money. But over the past few years, I have started trying to self-examine a bit more when it comes to my finances.
Money means different things to different people. For some it provides escape, and for others, it’s more about comfort or peace. A few years ago, Michael S. Malone at Fast Company interviewed Jacob Needleman, the philosopher and author about the meaning of money:
Having lots of money can be like a drug. It can make you feel powerful and giddy. It can convince you that everything’s going to be okay. Money makes us unjustifiably feel that we’re better and more important than we really are. When money can make you feel humble, then I think it’s really useful. But if it fattens your ego, which it often does, then look out.
Money certainly can provide a foundation upon which primitive needs are satisfied and then as Maslow believes, will allow our emotional needs to come into focus. But so often, we still try to fulfill self-esteem with things. Jacqueline Clement, an author within the Unitarian Universalist community writes:
Some material goods provide the basic necessities of life without which we might be quite miserable indeed. The risk comes once our needs have been met and we enter the realm of desires.
And this takes us back to the stereotype of the young gay man living beyond his means. More wisdom from our twentysomething guest writer:
If you’re in this predicament – first, you have to acknowledge it to yourself. Face up to the fact that you simply can’t afford to continue your life this way. You already know it’s true – now you just have to admit it to yourself.
The next step is to be honest with your friends – most of them will probably be relieved to hear you say it, because then they can admit to the same thing. Just let them know how much you value their friendship and explain that you’ve been trying to create an impression that isn’t really reality. You’re not rich. Big deal. Most people aren’t. But, if you ever want to be rich, you’ll need to start right now by making a commitment to stop ‘œkeeping up appearances.’
What do you think? Are queers better at having more fun in times of recession (as assumed by Longstaff) or are most of us buckling down like any penny-pinching, prudent straight family? After all, my life seems pretty straight and family bound as we live within our means.
Photo credit: stock.xchng.
Great question, Nina. I haven’t been to a club in almost 2 years, so I would be hard pressed to say if the gays are still out there partying away while the straights are at home. I think it might be true of some people, but it has nothing to do with sexuality. Sure, the mainstream media might be reporting about the economy in terms of a straight mindset. But don’t they always do that? Why should this be any different?
I think the biggest determinants of your personal wealth are probably where you live, what you drive and how many kids you have (which feeds into your career choices, to a large degree). So, if being hip and gay means living in a ‘transitional’ urban neighbourhood, it doesn’t require vast wealth to get into the game. I don’t know anyone who regards cars as a status icon in gay culture and, as you mentioned, few queers have kids. This would logically create a lot more disposable income to spend in gyms, bars and shopping centres. As long as you don’t incur debt to make this happen, it won’t affect you financially, and it’s also easy to scale back in tough times without a lot of stress.
On the downside, any economic contraction often involves job loss and I’d argue that queers are a possible target of discrimination when it comes to getting downsized. Get hard stats on that, however, would be difficult.
From an Old Farts perspective I would say gays have cut back some but not as drastically as heterosexuals and we still go out and party a lot more.
The following reasons come off the top of my head:
1/ The aforementioned dearth of children to take care of.
2/ Personally I think we tend to live in less expensive housing because a] we tend to be more transient, b] we prefer apartments so that someone else has to mow the grass, and (probably most important) c] most of the mortgages that are in trouble were taken out by couples with TWO incomes….more gays don’t own homes or only own small ones because we couldn’t get the mortgages on our single incomes MARRIED couples could with two.
(SEE…if they had always let us get Married maybe we’d be in the same boat they are….ROFLMAO….Paybacks a mutha)