We’re Here! We’re Queer! We’re Not Going Shopping!

[unrepentant progress]

In 2002, when I was soliciting submissions for the anthology Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life, I received this message on a Working-Class Studies listserv: “Excuse me for saying so, but isn’t gay and working-class kind of a contradiction in terms?”

It was such a great line that I ended up using it in the book. Obviously, the short answer is no, but the impulse behind the question isn’t hard to understand. For decades, popular concepts of the “gay community” have so frequently been paired with middle- and privileged-class status markers that “gay” sometimes resembles a brand name. And what about those stereotypes? We’re DINKs, Guppies, trend-setters, gentrifiers. We’re “hyper-acquisitive” and, of course, we have those “high disposable incomes” everyone gets so excited about.

Far from it. Recent studies, in fact, suggest that LGBTQ people may actually be more vulnerable to being poor: more likely to experience food insecurity; more likely, in rural settings and/or among people of color, to be at income risk; more likely than U.S. adults in general to report annual incomes under $30K (39% vs. 28%).

That is, of course, unless you believe in the secret “Better Living Through Homosexuality” fund.

Full post: http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/were-here-were-queer-were-not-going-shopping/

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Poor people are invisible.

No matter how many people are in poverty, no matter how high the poverty rate grows, media focus is almost exclusively on the 'middle class' and up. Even 'struggling' TV families are portrayed with enormous amounts of living space and plenty of consumer goods. You don't see sitcoms about entire families stuffed into one room efficiency apartments or living homeless.

So as media portrayals of gay people have become more prevalent, they've been the 'dinks', 'guppies', and 'gentrifiers'.