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Are You Valuable Because You Have Money?

By Bob Minor
Minor Details

Touting the LGBT community, particularly its white males, as a group that spends a larger disposal income has been a strategy for marketing and advertising for decades. Mainstream businesses and advertisers, though often slow to get the profit-making implications of the message, have responded by targeting the dollars of gay and lesbian consumers.

Opinions about the actual nature of the market range from denial that LGBT people are actually economically better off, to surveys that are often skewed to questioning only those from upper income brackets. The research seems to support all the claims.

Reliable surveys have also shown a sizeable gap between the earnings and disposable income spending of gay male couples and lesbian couples. The difference reflects the over-all gap in income between men and women in our society doubled by the fact that two male incomes are being compared with two female incomes. There's no surprise here, since in the U.S. women still make no more than 75 cents for every dollar made by men in the same position.

For those who celebrate such things, it's clear that our worth is in our pocket books. Being courted by marketers has little if anything to with the value of LGBT individuals and their relationships. It has everything to do with the bottom line. It's how much money we earn and how willing we are to consume.

The American Legacy Foundation runs an ad enlightening the gay community about the tobacco industry's Project SCUM, which targetted the gay community This is no more blatantly clear than in documents recently uncovered by the American Legacy Foundation, a public health foundation created as a result of the 1998 tobacco companies' legal settlement with a number of states. In the documents, food and tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds speaks of targeting San Francisco's LGBT consumers in the 1990s with "Project SCUM," short for "Subculture Urban Marketing." In the master plan, America's largest tobacco manufacturer strategizes its marketing to the LGBT community whose rates of smoking are far above the national average. LGBT people are "scum" valuable only as a market.

Right wing religious and political extremists agree with the more optimistic economic assertions of the marketers. They leap upon claims of our greater income and spending potential as evidence to argue that LGBT people are not real victims of discrimination. No changes are needed, because we are, in fact, well-off beneficiaries of society just the way it is. We're actually a privileged group living off the fat of the land. So, why would LGBT people need any legal protections?

Other groups who have experienced discrimination, have often characterized us the same way. So, when we compare anti-gay oppression with white racism, people of color picture gay people as rich, white whiners who wouldn't know real oppression if it hit them in their overly fat pocketbooks.

The latest salvo in the campaign to court us economically has been fired with Richard Florida's new book: The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (Basic Books, 2002). Florida is on the current high-end business luncheon circuit advising cities that their future is tied to their ability to attract people who "create meaningful new forms."

This "creative class" includes not only scientists, engineers, architects, and university professors, but artists, poets, novelists, entertainers, actors, designers, and other cultural figures.

And cities that attract them no longer follow the usual strategies to recruit more companies in the hope of becoming the next Silicone Valley, or building professional sports stadiums, or developing retail complexes.

They have begun to recognize demographic changes that make young people, singles, new immigrants, and gay people critical to the social fabric.

They are known to be open to diversity and are actively and publicly working to cultivate it.

Now, to most of us it takes little imagination to conclude that such cities must come to value, not merely tolerate, LGBT people along with non-straight-acting heterosexuals who feel safer in places that

welcome queer people. Florida points that out in his writing. His "Creativity Index" measures diversity by "the Gay Index, a reasonable proxy for an area's openness to different kinds of people and ideas." In fact, an article based on his book is subtitled "Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race."

This is not only good news for LGBT people. It's good news for everyone who finds little attraction in white bread suburbs, slick malls, big box retail stores, cookie-cutter houses, and fake replicas of buildings with character.

If our cities would take Florida's advice, inner cities would continue to revive historic buildings, established neighborhoods, and older downtown retail and living complexes. What this creative class is attracted to, he argues, is an authentic sense of inner cities, and what developers in the past have considered grit.

Of course, in reality many LGBT people are attracted to the suburban gentry lifestyle. They find comfort in tidy, straight coupling places that claim to be "good locations for raising a family." They are targetable consumers of affluence. And they want to blend into "the good life" represented by suburbia. They might even become the "Jones" everyone should keep up with.

Unless they're willing to move into established inner city neighborhoods that include large and stately homes, Florida's recommendations won't mean much to them personally. They may even join those who complain about the city, though they may be attracted to the clubs and colorful culture only inner cities provide.

So, people who might otherwise see no value in us should just grit their teeth and tolerate LGBT people because they have financial worth. And that's an appealing argument in our profit-oriented culture with its addictive need to maintain a fast-paced economy.

No matter how Florida's reminders to business leaders that LGBT people do have a value work, we are reminded that such appeals are not about the value of whom we love. They are not about our value as human beings. They are not really about our cultural contributions. And they are not about what we can offer a very sick society as alternatives to its failed values and institutions.

They are also arguments that work as long as no one recognizes that the majority of LGBT people are working class people who struggle along with other working class people.

Now this argument is really only dangerous to us when we also believe that this really is what we are worth. It's when we value ourselves and each other on the basis of what we drive, how large are houses are, and whether we fit into a lifestyle defined by how much we spend. And when we do that we are just as sick and lost as the greater society struggling around us. Then we'll do everything we can to get the approval of a system that couldn't care less about who we are as human beings.
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., is the author of Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human (HumanityWorks!, 2001), and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He may be reached through www.fairnessproject.org.
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