Gay Affluence is a Myth
Queer people are poorer than straight peers for systemic and individual reasons.
While I knew from personal experience that queer people had less money than straight people, digging into the financial data on the wealth gap between LGBTQ and straight people changed my life.
I encountered Prudential’s LGBTQ financial surveys 5 years ago. In the most recent survey, from 2016, 41 percent of LGBTQ couples said they could not make ends meet. This was an increase of 10 percent from the previous survey.
In reading about the financial experience of other queer people and thinking over my career history, I wondered whether queer workers were penalized for gender nonconformity through lower salaries, whether LGBTQ people were hiding out in lower-paying fields where they felt ‘safe’ to be out, given that roughly half of us are out on the job, or whether they were self-selecting into lower-paying careers than their straight counterparts.
LGBTQ people experience poverty at higher rates than cis, straight peers. Queer people tend to have less of a safety net in the first place: On average we earn less and may have strained relationships with families of origin. LGBTQ people are also over-represented in the industries that were most impacted by the pandemic. Forty percent of LGBTQ people…
