“I think we have this sense, borrowing from the campaign, that ‘it gets better’,” Gary Gates, a law professor and the author of the Williams Institute’s report, told me. “And that’s true: It is getting better, but it’s not getting better everywhere all the time. Things in rural Alabama look very different from Seattle, and as more LGBT people come out, they are disproportionately more likely to come out in Alabama than Seattle.”

And Alabama, like many other places where gays of another generation might have stayed in the closet or left town altogether but today are coming out, is poorer than Seattle. As a result, the number of self-reported gays and lesbians living in poverty is rising.



Ironically, at first glance, this makes it appear that an increase in political and social acceptance for LGBT in Americans is accompanied by a fall in economic standing. Progress isn’t making gays and lesbians poor though, but it is allowing more poor people to acknowledge their sexuality. As these numbers become more readily available, it reminds us of why the myth of gay affluence ever existed in the first place.

* * *

Up through the 1970s and ‘80s, gays and lesbians played a seedier role in the public consciousness. The “gay lifestyle” was the bastion of society’s most depraved individuals; sleazy bathhouses, leather bars, and so on. The image of gays and lesbians began to change, however, once Wall Street and Madison Avenue realized that there was a vast, untapped market of potential consumers.

“Corporate America was one of the first targets in terms of trying to improve policies around LGBT issues,” says Gates, “and part of it was this idea that they needed to focus on the LGBT community as a consumer market that mattered.”

Marketing firms conducted surveys to try to show not just affluence, but disproportionate levels of brand loyalty were a hallmark of gays and lesbians. In the media, gay men became well-to-do, cosmopolitan, and voraciously consumeristic. In 2012, Experian, a national marketing firm, released a business report claiming that the average household income of a married or partnered gay man is nearly 20 percent more than a straight married or partnered man ($116,000 compared to $94,500).

“The downside,” says Gates, “is that those marketing studies looked at the LGBT community as a consumer market, which is a very different perspective compared with how a social science researcher who does poverty research would look at those questions.”

Gates and others social scientists believe that public perception of LGBT people’s economic standing comes from these kinds of marketing studies and campaigns. Finding less biased research is more difficult. Economic breakdowns by racial and ethnic demographics are widely documented through census data, but for sexual minorities, this kind of information is almost non-existent. Complicating matters more, the census does not ask directly what a person’s sexual orientation is, though researchers can get some notion of that number indirectly: Instead, the census records people who report being in a same-sex-partnered household.