The Power of Your Purse: An Easy Way to Support your Gay* Friends

During the great New York marriage debate of aught-leven (working on it), you may have noticed a relatively new breed of op-eds voicing support for marriage equality: the economists. Forget about freedom, love, all *ahem* men being created equal… there’s a dollars and cents argument to be made for expanding the wedding industry in your state. In a piece criticizing this trend run in the New York Times, Jaye Cee Whitehead writes:

States and cities are, as the New York executives pointed out, competing to attract talent in a globally competitive labor market. The wedding industry benefits, of course, when more couples are allowed to marry. And marriage equality is associated with revenue gains from sales taxes and license fees. Backers of gay marriage speak openly of the gains from “marriage tourism” in states that have legalized same-sex marriage.

The amount of money involved is not pocket change: the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, puts the economic gain in Massachusetts alone at $111 million in the five years since same-sex marriage was legalized there. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states would yield $1 billion in annual revenue over a 10-year period.

If you calculate those millions of dollars in pizzas (as we in the Friendfactor office sometimes like to do when struggling to conceptualize large sums of money)… legalizing the freedom to marry would allow for the purchase of many, many pizzas by New  Yorkers. Is that the best argument for equality? Debatable. Would it hurt NY to attract that business/money/pizzas? Our position is a staunch “no.”

There’s a great story out of the Pam’s House Blend blog today that’s got us thinking about how we can all make daily decisions to support our gay* friends. Oyster.com recently ran a blog post recommending hotels for out of town couples coming to the Big Apple to tie the gay knot, as it were, and included a hotel owned by the notoriously homophobic Donald Trump (and if you think the hair is coincidental to the fact that The Donald doesn’t respect the gay folks in his life, you’ve got another thing coming). Pam petitioned Oyster to remove the Trump property from their list, and within the week they’d done just that.

A job very well done, but we say let’s take it a step further. With the wealth of independent businesses here in New York and around the country, I see no reason that my money should ever support people who don’t support my LGBT friends. It’s not always easy to know who the offenders are — who’d have thought the barnyard traitorous Chick-fil-A cows were also lousy Ffriends? — but if we can make a habit of spending with gay-friendly businesses instead of the other guys, we may just find that dollars speak louder than words.

Are there products or businesses you try to avoid (or seek out!) because you support your gay* friends? Share the knowledge in the comments!

The Stranger’s Queer Issue: Glee is a Pressing Social Issue (Sort Of)!

The Stranger just came out with its annual queer issue, a collection of articles about demographics (mostly LGBT-related demographics—although there is one floating article about undergraduates sleeping with their professors) who are “doing it wrong.” I thought the pieces about homophobes and (coming in a distant second) Glee were most interesting.

David Schmader argues that homophobia is losing cultural traction. To regain some leverage, he suggests that homophobes retool their ideology in the noble, combed over tradition of Donald Trump:

For a lesson on how to best present anti-gay bigotry in this age of general okayness with gayness, you’d do well to study the maneuvers of a man with legitimate ties to both Satan and Hitler: Donald Trump. The real-estate-mogul-turned-reality-TV-star-turned-failed-presidential-contender spiced up his faux-campaigning with some relatively inspired anti-gay bigotry—”inspired” mostly because it seemed so casual. Asked by Bill O’Reilly for his opinions on gay marriage, Trump said, “I just don’t feel good about it. I don’t feel right about it.” Trump further explained his position to the New York Times: “It’s like in golf. A lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It’s weird… I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.”

Schmader adds that while people are losing interest in Biblical arguments against homosexuality, “nothing is easier than getting people to fetishize their own preferences.”

Which ties in nicely with the Glee piece. While Glee is not really on par with homophobia, issue-magnitude-wise (unless it runs for a LOT more seasons), Hank Stuever nevertheless criticizes it at length for encouraging overconfidence.

If you watch Glee with disllusionment instead of boundless hope, you suddenly realize that all those musical numbers merely appear to be that perfect in the minds of the characters. No teenagers anywhere can sing and dance like that, unrehearsed. Glee never stops to underline that fact for the audience or make use of it. If Glee was in touch with the reality of being gay—which can have its dark side—it would make the cruelly honest decision to switch off the Auto-Tune and razzle-dazzle and show a bunch of kids in a choir room singing badly but believing they’re great.

This is arguably the same overconfidence that Schmader sees permeating Trump-style homophobia—only baseless confidence could convince you that your personal preferences were important enough to make, say, same-sex marriage illegal.

What do you guys think of the future of homophobia? Of Glee? Of talking about Glee like it’s important? Comment away!