A recap of stories lazily reiterating the claim that gays are rich, which we aren’t.
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Nice, France believes the “gay and lesbian clientele… often have more disposable income and can travel outside of the peak school holiday periods.” I’ve seen no data for French homosexualists to back this up, and the quoted functionary, Denis Zanon, didn’t respond to an inquiry. There’s no reason to believe any of this is true, least of all the idea that we don’t have kids hence can travel anytime.
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The least credible claim about India made in the 21st century: Suddenly that filthy Second World country, which can’t even keep a power grid running, views us as having
high levels of disposable incomes and awareness about travel in the LGBT community.
“They have high levels of disposable income and a desire to travel. Earlier, they used to visit countries like Thailand, Malaysia and all, but now as India opens up to this new phenomenon, they want to travel here,” [a functionary] added.
And none of us would be caught dead in a cesspool like India. I would tend to expect quite a few of the gay males who travel to Thailand and Malaysia are sex tourists. (The last friend who travelled to Thailand picked up giardia there.)
The piece then falls prey to the seemingly irresistible alliteration that plagues British hacks:
Many international cities like London, Antwerp and Vienna are trying hard to woo “the pink dollar, Euro and Yen” travellers, as the niche market is known.
The quoted functionary, Rika Jean-François, did not respond to my questions.
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A much-syndicated AFP story almost fell prey to Pink Pound Syndrome (here it was the nonalliterative “pink dollar”) and paraphrased Clark Massad of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association thus: “As most are not parents, they have more disposable income, and have the added bonus that they can travel outside peak holiday periods.”
To his credit, Massad denied saying anything of the sort. “I make it a point to state to people that it is not necessarily whether or not gays and lesbians earn more or have more disposable income than their straight counterparts, but rather that they tend to devote a higher percentage of their disposable income towards leisure travel.” This would imply that journo Denholm Barnetson misquoted him; I have asked Barnetson for a comment and will add an update here if I get one.
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“Does Shawn Pelofsky have a message for the children?”
Yeah, make a lot of gay make friends [sic]. They will provide, provide, provide! And they have disposable income [sic].
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Did you know there’s a boom in gay sports bars and it’s because of our “disposable income” which “fuels profits”? Well, that’s the claim made in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, a magazine with one of those classy Helvetica nameplates that are like catnip to urban intellectuals, so it’s gotta be true!
The photo used in the print-edition spread isn’t stereotypical at all. Obviously this is a brand-new kind of gay bar, one that isn’t all about cute boys whose roommates borrowed their shirts or they just forgot them at home or something.
And I guess the hot new thing with gays is wearing shorts so baggy they remind you of the shapeless paranoia/overcompensation shorts preferred by straight guys who never want anybody to notice they have an ass or a basket. (Look at American boys at a beach. Then look at Australian boys.)
Sports bars are for fags what tiki bars are for straights: Homogenized theme restaurants redolent of a land you’ll never visit, let alone call home.
When asked about the gays-are-rich angle, hack Kurt Soller replied with a form letter.
Researcher roundup
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I enjoyed Allison Martell’s presentation at Hacks & Hackers on journos’ mathematical illiteracy. It barely scratched the surface, of course. (I’m not going to write a full review of that event, where I asked all the assholish questions. But good job, Ivor Tossell, for trying to squelch my efforts to help out another member of the audience.) Allison told me she’d written a paper on lesbian incomes back dans la journée, but I’m obviously never going to see it despite asking for it twice.
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Kathleen Lahey at Queen’s complimented me on my bibliography, adding I’d “missed some Canadian research – all peer-reviewed, some of which was used in the Canadian marriage cases.” I could just search under her name, I was told.
This is so insipid it reminds me of Jefferson Frank, the British researcher who, when given a list of citations with a request to receive those papers, top-posted a response that repeated the citations. Lahey seems like the kind of academic who answers the question “Do you know what time it is?” with “Yes.” Or she seems like Orly Taitz, who responds to every challenge to back up her statements with a demand that you do your own research.
Just send me the papers, Kathleen. We’re too old to play “Rumpelstiltskin.”