Home > Health & Lifestyle > Yes Virginia, There Really are Poor Gay People

Yes Virginia, There Really are Poor Gay People

Mar 20th, 2009 | 5 responsesPosted by John in Health & Lifestyle

For the first time a study has looked poor gay people.

Here are some of the findings featured in USA Today.

Lesbian couples are more likely to be poor than married heterosexuals, and children of same-sex parents are twice as likely to live in poverty as those of traditional married couples, a new report shows.

The report is an analysis of the most recent data on same-sex unmarried partners from the 2000 Census and two smaller surveys that include questions on sexual orientation. Together, it argues, they debunk “a popular stereotype (that) paints lesbians and gay men as an affluent elite.”

Unlike the upper-middle-class gay characters on TV’s The L Word and Will and Grace, “There are clearly many poor lesbian, gay and bisexual people,” says co-author Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“That alone is an important finding,” Badgett says.

via Queerty You Mean to Say There Are Poor Gay People?

Tags: Finance

Jeff

Broke Back Mountain
dmet

This brings to mind what could be referred to as regionalism. If one has a dialect that infers the stereotype of ignorance (some appalachian accents, for example), people often assume the accent is indicative of intelligence, income, and social status. Living in an ‘island’ of tolerance is wonderful. Many warriors for minority rights are the rural, sometimes poor, humans who live their lives fighting battles we should not forget still exist.
SPB

This should not come as a surprise. Until now, the GLBT community that existed outside major metro areas like NY, Chicago and L.A., did not get much attention. Likewise, I am sure that much more of those non big city people were and still are hesitant to identify as GLBT. Acceptance and tolerance are still way behind the curve in more rural areas. I think that is where the percetion of the wealthy gay elite comes from. I would also be interested in another statistic. In this economic climate, how many GLBT people have lost their jobs, only to find becoming re employed required a trip back to the old closet? GLBT friendly employers tend to exist mostly in large urban areas. How many factory workers need to make over their image to find a new job? I think all of this has an impact on the economic well being of the GLBT community.
John Williams

The stereotype of the affluent elite gays has been created by the affluent elite gays. Attend any gay function in the US and you will find the same affluent elitist gays making snide comments about any person not wearing the correct labels in their cloths. There have been poor gays since the beginning of time, our community does not embrace this fact, we like everything pretty. Until our community found out about affluent elite gays contracting AIDS, the community did nothing!
Gary Dee

Well, duuuuuuh! I guess they finally got the email. Talk about people who need to live in the real world. Maybe someone ought to clue them in to another ceiling and it’s called the lavander ceiling.

Not every gay, out there, earns six figures a year. There are lots of us who earn just enough to get by, and surprise, we’re feeling the economic pinch too.

Perhaps the money they just wasted on this stupid study could be better spent on something like funding more AIDS research. Now, that’s something that would be a real surprise.

Yes Virginia, There Really are Poor Gay People

Search

Advertisment

Archives

Content Partners

Subscribe via Email