Looking For A Solution To Your Financial Headaches?

Consider the art of buttfuckery:

My first phone call for this story was to Lee Badgett, the brilliant economist with the Williams Institute, an LGBT public policy think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles. Badgett has been researching gay people and poverty, and is so polite that she suppressed a groan when I told her the reason for my call, but I understood her objections: This story could confirm a stereotype of gays as more privileged than straights. It could make us seem frivolous, and it would continue to ignore the least advantaged in our community.

But then I asked Badgett to send me her preliminary data on gays and poverty. She did so -- the data appear in this story for the first time -- and the numbers show a complicated picture, which does reveal some financial advantage in being a gay man. According to census figures, gay and lesbian couples experience poverty at about the same rate as straight couples of the same race, age, and education level. But when you look at all gay men -- including singles -- they are half as likely to be living in poverty as straight men, according to numbers Badgett compiled from a 2002 survey by the National Center for Health Statistics. That survey showed that 2.1% of gay and bisexual men ages 18–44 live in poverty, compared with 4.2% of straight men in the same age group. (Straight women and lesbian/bisexual women in that age group had no statistically significant difference in poverty rates -- for each cohort, the rate was about 6%.)


However, there may be drawbacks:

Badgett also raised the possibility that in an economy as weak as America’s in late 2008, gay people might undergo discrimination at higher rates as bosses fire employees and pick among a larger applicant pool for new workers. Data from the latest Out & Equal Workplace Advocates survey -- again, presented in this story for the first time -- offer reasons to substantiate her concern. San Francisco–based Out & Equal partners with Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs Communications every year to survey American employees on their attitudes toward LGBT coworkers. The group’s latest survey contains mostly good news: 79% of heterosexuals agree that gay people shouldn’t be judged by their sexual orientation. Only 22% say they think they would feel uncomfortable working for a boss who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. But here’s the worrisome part: In 2005, when the U.S. economy was vibrant (gross domestic product grew 2.9% that year), 62% of heterosexuals favored written nondiscrimination policies at their companies. In the first two quarters of this year, GDP grew only 2.1% (after shrinking 0.2% in the last quarter of 2007), and now only 46% of heterosexuals favor written antibias policies. Apparently equality seems more affordable when everyone is richer.