The Cost of Being Gay

Let’s begin with a stipulation: It’s difficult to write about one’s personal spending without seeming like a snob or a communist, a sybarite or a Spartan. Some of the things I give money for will surely seem silly or extravagant to you, and some of the things I go without may seem like necessities in your household. But the highly idiosyncratic nature of consumption raises a cultural question: Is there a particularly gay way of spending?

Ambrose Bierce called money "an evidence of culture.” He was kidding, sort of -- joking, as he often did, about the airs of the rich and cultured. (He also called money “a passport to polite society.”) But at some basic level, money is surely evidence of culture, in the sense that the items we value enough to purchase help define who we are. So if we can agree that there is a gay culture, there should be testimony to it in our spending habits. Just look at the ads in this magazine. They lead to another question: With the economy the way it is, can any of us afford to be gay?

This question presented itself to me in stark terms this past summer as I sat on the Fire Island Pines beach scrubbing my jeans with sand. A few weeks earlier, having watched my mutual-fund gains shrink from the merely mediocre to the almost theoretical, I had resolved to cut back. And so when I needed new jeans, I foreswore $300-plus designer denim in favor of a $145 pair from the French basics store A.P.C. The store puts a little label on its untreated-denim jeans saying that if you soak them in salt water and then rub them with sand, they will break in easily and develop those striations and wear marks that high-end designers charge the extra money for.

That’s why I was abusing my jeans with beach sand and drawing strange glances: I wanted a designer look at a more affordable price. Whether that makes me a fussy, stereotypical faggot is another question, one I hope to address in this story.

Another stipulation, an obvious but important one: $145 is still an outrageous sum for jeans. (And actually, according to A.P.C.’s website, the store now charges $155 for the same pair.) But not long ago, at the New York City outpost of Universal Gear (a chain store with locations in the gay sections of four cities), I found Dolce & Gabbana jeans for $274.95 -- on sale, down from $345. Under the cold glare of D&G, $145 seems like a bargain. And this particular gay man is not going to the Gap to buy its saggy-assed jeans, even if they are only $55, and even if I do live on a reporter’s salary, and even if that does mean I eat leftovers most nights and have traded down from Junípero gin ($35 per bottle) to Tanqueray ($20 per bottle). Call me a queen, but Gap jeans don’t fit me, in at least two senses: They don’t fit my body, and, I would argue, they don’t fit my culture.

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%.)

These data may mean only that gay men under 45 who live in poverty are less likely than others to reveal themselves in a survey. But could the data also mean something else? Have gay men created a culture in which poverty is less acceptable than it is for straight men? And do we work harder to avoid it because of those cultural expectations? To put it blithely, is $145 the least we can spend on jeans, because otherwise the jeans wouldn’t be gay enough?