(UPDATED) A recap of stories lazily reiterating the claim that gays are rich, which we aren’t. (Previously.)

• Who’s gonna put Obama back in office next year? Filthy-rich gays. Politico reported it and Jezebel and Kos repeated it, so surely it must be true.

  Professional gay men, with a personal stake in politics and less likely to have children or college funds that would consume their disposable income, have long been key to Democratic fundraising.

  A beautifully qualified statement, but still false. (Except for the lower incidence of children.) What’s really going on, I think, is Democrats are pitching the small number of really rich gays. If so, I’m sure they’ll be surprised at how many of those turn out to be Republicans.

  (Politico hacks Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman didn’t respond to queries. Neither did Jezebel editrix Irin Carmon or the great Markos Moulitsas. Jezebel’s system won’t post my comment, either.)

• Stuff White People Like Dept.: Lesbos get 10% off at maternity store. “Only in the Slope,” as the article declares. Proprietress Karen Paperno digs herself quite the hole:

  “The lesbians love it and the gay males get upset,” she says. “But their disposable income is so much higher than women’s. Men just make more than women…. People have gotten upset but it’s my store and I have the right to do it,” she says. “I offer hardship discounts of all kinds, all the time. This is just one that I advertise.”

  Who could object to this sort of thing? If you do, it’s “[a] sad commentary on how not PC PC folks think they are.”

  It has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with actual factual correctness. Briefly stated, Karen Paperno is full of shit. As I explained in an E-mail (and a postal letter) to Paperno:

  The difference between you and me is I have read essentially all the research on lesbian and gay incomes and earnings – and you haven’t. Hence I can confidently advise you that the overwhelming majority of studies hold that:

  • gay males earn less than straight males on average

  • lesbians earn more than straight women on average (often not by a wide measure)

  • gay-male and lesbian earnings are almost equivalent to each other on average

  Lesbians have children roughly half as often as straight couples, and gay males about half as often again. So if you were trying to increase business among the most economically vulnerable couples, you’d give gay dads a discount, not lesbian moms.

  And surely you are aware that the general earnings differential you misapply to the gay and lesbian population almost disappears when you match hetero males and females for education and experience.

  Based on system error messages, the store has not received my E-mail. In the unlikely event she responds to my letter, I will report back.

• The Hawaiians are running a gay film festival. Why? Well, isn’t one reason obvious? “Because they typically have a higher level of disposable income,” said Daniel Chun of the Honolulu Gay & Lesbian Cultural Foundation. They don’t, of course, as I informed the Foundation (no response).

The worst gay-marketing survey ever?
Donovan Steyl, come on down!

Pink X strikes again. This time it’s not pink pound, which at least is alliterative, or pink dollar, which isn’t, but pink rand. Yes, impoverished, balkanized, crime-ridden, ungovernable Second World hotspot South Africa now wants us to believe their gay men are rich.

Donovan Steyl of something called Lunch Box Media (“It’s all about the package!”), this is all your fault.

According to the ABNSA Gay Consumer profile that was commissioned in 2008, roughly 10% of the South African population is gay. This amounts to just over 4.8 million people.

Actually, since 96.5% of the respondents in this survey (PDF) were men but the total number of respondents were not reported, that magical 10% figure has no factual basis whatsoever. And did you know the ostensible authors, Qualitative Quarter, call the whole report “statistically significant,” which a “report” cannot be?

(On questioning, QQ denies being the author of the study. “The information you refer to was collated by our company; we did not conduct the poll. I have referred your query to the Gay Pages,” whoever answers their general E-mail wrote. I’m waiting for a response from Gay Pages. Another source cited, the Theta Project, did not respond to E-mails.)

Academic Nicola Kleyn explained her role thus (after blasting me a little):

Based on a request from an MBA student of mine, I provided Gay Pages with some input around scaling, the wording of items, and how the survey results could be analy[z]ed for this survey. I also referred the survey developers to someone to assist with the tabulation of findings This input took the form of a single meeting. I was never responsible for any aspect of quality of this survey and received no remuneration for this project.

Your concerns about sampling are valid – it was a convenience sample and so non-response bias and the readership of the magazine needs to be considered when analy[z]ing the results. As to what variables were measured: This depends on what the objectives of the survey were. Naturally you are welcome to suggest how this survey might have been improved but I suggest you take this up with the authors.

That hasn’t been going well so far.

Anyway, Donovan, what were you saying? (Everything here is sic, obviously.)

The term “DINK” for this demographic was coined… Dual Income No Kids. This means that the gay community tend to have more disposable income…. The “Pink Rand” is a considerable segment of the South African market and is known for its superior spending value.

There are no facts to back this up.

Who, incidentally, is ostensibly benefitting from this pink rand? What a surprise: Absolut.

Some more “facts” in this, the worst gay-marketing survey ever:

• Income ranges are listed (a full 25% in the highest two bands!), but not average income. (Median income – a more useful figure anyway – is given as R30,000 a month.) Nor is there any comparison with matched heterosexual groups; right there that makes the whole report useless.

• Respondents were asked about their coming-out age, “planned retirement age,” pets (including dog breeds and pet-food brands), restaurant attendance, booze brands, “luxury goods,” wristwatches, jewelry, what supermarkets they shop at, and of course hobbies.

  I’m not even going to get into the biases inherent in a report that polls South African gays about their pets but not their race. How many Xhosa lesbian couples earn over R400,000 a year, I wonder?

• “47% are self-employed. 75% are in management positions…. Respondents tend to be highly skilled, creative and self-reliant.”

• Occupational categories were listed, but they don’t match those used in the South African census (I checked), meaning you can’t compare pink-rand apples to official oranges.

• “80% consider themselves spiritual.”

• “Many respondents from rural areas responded.” In fact, over 70% of respondents lived in cities or the two most populous provinces.

• “With so many cohabiting couples in the community,” the report begins, then forgets to tell us how many.

• Did you know there was a U.S. gay magazine (read by 3% of respondents) called ON? (Surely Out?)

So many factors are more prevalent with gays than with the general population: “Education levels are much higher.” “Eating out and entertaining… occur much more frequently.” “Platinum-credit-card ownership is much higher.” “[F]ar more than the straight population” will “go for regular wellness and beauty-therapy treatments.” Having “luxury brands at the top of a survey list of the most-commonly-owned automobiles… is quite different from mainstream studies.” None of these claims was remotely verified.

What is the likely truth here? There are lots of homosexual blacks in the townships, a few gay coloureds, and a raft of entitled, ladder-climbing white gay arrivistes with delusions of grandeur. That’s who Steyl is talking about, and they are, incidentally, a group with the second-worst English accent (the dreaded “Sithifrican ixint”) on earth. (What’s even worse? “Zimbibwean.”) Just to declare my biases.

What does Donovan Steyl have to say for himself?

He pointed me to two unrelated (equally nonscientific) surveys and finished his top-posted message with “Stick to your day job!”

How long are you going to have a job, Dono, if you keep peddling false numbers to your clients? My advice to them: Hire Donovan Steyl and Lunch Box Media if you want, but don’t expect him to base his pitch on verified – or even verifiable – numbers.

(UPDATED) Christian Louboutin and homosexualist rugger Gareth Thomas are superclose friends, according to an article whose writer, Richard Godwin, is honest and observant enough to note the disparity of presence. (Dek: “What does 101 kg of Welsh man meat have in common with 74 kg of French æsthete?”)

[…T]iny Louboutin, on his knees, binding his lean, tanned arms around Thomas’s vast waist…. [T]he Frenchman has already advised the Welshman how to sit – Thomas finds it hard to bring his knees together….

You get the picture. In case you don’t, This Is London helpfully provided several (oddly, without crediting the shooter).

Manliness is so very much about carriage.

(Full photos from shoot.)

You don’t need to be Google to engage in a little industrial psychology. I note the tone of Berg London’s update postings (“weeknotes”), which create a near-palpable YOU ARE HERE feel. The mystique they are trying to imbue runs as follows: These theoreticians (in Berg’s case, of media) are doing important, interesting work. Unlike lackadaisical freelancers and procrastinators, they get things done every week – and they’re only too happy to tell us about it.

The nucleus around which all this atmosphere crystallizes is the word studio – so important it merits its own page. In this day and age, who really wants to be a “developer” working in an “office”? (Or, God help us, a “plex” or a “campus”?) At the very least, wouldn’t you prefer to be a designer, or, if more advanced, a creative technologist or director, or, at the pinnacle, a principal, all working tickety-boo in a studio?

This kind of mythmaking, while agreeable and humanizing, is also self-aggrandizing. And it works: Berg keeps hiring, and their shit don’t stink. It’s a model that works well enough that another theoretician, this time of urban computing, adopted it wholesale, “studio” and all.

Here’s how slipshod and self-contradictory a “respected” American publication can be.

• Ben Yagoda’s article ostensibly advocating the use of periods and commas outside quotation marks (not a hard-and-fast rule even in British) uses neutral quotation marks:

  

  Then again, this is one of those ultra-fake Web sites (the Awl is also in this group) that uses the known failure of nospace-emdash-nospace and also neutral quotation marks and apostrophes.

• And the piece resorts to fake superscripts in an unnecessary usage of same, 16th edition. (That’s a Microsoft Word abomination.)

• And it uses what nerds call a backtick (`) as an opening single quotation mark.

• And we don’t end heds with periods, though of course there is a meta-reason for doing so in this case.

• Yagoda quotes a misspelling of “darnedest” without later correction:

  Conan O’Brien, for example, recently posted:

  Conan’s staffers’ kids say the darndest things. Unfortunately, in this case "darndest" means "incriminating".

• Yagoda ignores the fact that, in any presentation where markup is possible, the correct way to write the titles of TV shows is in italics, hence:

  [I]ronically, given the anecdote about Tales of the City, PBS is the only widely available channel that has any serious LGBT content, e.g., documentaries such as Ask Not and Out in the Silence.

  (I corrected the CAPS-AS-emphasis error endemic to half-assed prose like Yagoda’s, and the errant semicolon. One could debate the need for a hyphen at one point; can you see where?)

• The sentence from Pitchfork is correctly and unambiguously written thus:

  Covers on the LP include the Beatles’ “Michelle,” Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and tracks from Serge Gainsbourg and Henri Salvador.

  Note my avoidance of the collision of apostrophe and closing single quotation mark – unremediated in the original, with its half-assed wordspace inside two fake apostrophes.

  At any rate, Yagoda is too dumb to notice that he irretrievably altered the source by quoting the original sentence, which forces the use of single quotation marks in American and Canadian style.

Let me go back to a previous point. Could Ben Yagoda explain – off the top of his head, without recourse to any reference material – when British usage does place periods and commas inside quotation marks?

We’re only five months into the year, yet this is – straight-up – ’011’s worst article about copy-editing. Quote me on that. And do nothing Ben Yagoda suggests.

Update

(2011.05.31) The illustrious Gruber linked to this posting. We had E-mailed back and forth before that happened. I have no objection to being called “cranky” in this context. The issues here, in case they weren’t clear already, are:

• Yagoda understands half the problem and offers half a solution for it. This simply is not an issue of putting periods and commas inside quotation marks. Quotation-mark rules are actually much more complex than that especially in U.K. usage, which, Yagoda is unaware, actually comprises several variant usages.

• Yagoda and his publication cannot correctly render the examples that claim to prove his point.

  I can’t put my hands on an article I read this year that stated that Slate’s content-management system has remained essentially unchanged since 2003. Let’s accept I have recalled that fact correctly. Even given the stated and actual character encoding on Yagoda’s piece (UTF-8), I assume the Slate CMS can handle US-ASCII characters and nothing else. (A typical error of American computer programmers.)

  Given that constraint, in an article about punctuation somebody along the production line should have known enough to use character entities (e.g., “ or ”) to encode that punctuation. You never have to leave the US-ASCII repertoire, yet the result in the browser is correct. (Don’t do this as a matter of course; your copy becomes uneditable. But we aren’t talking about day-to-day uses here.)

  So yes, Slate’s “typesetting” is “appalling.” For this specific article, it need not have been, I estimate. But because it was, that fact became fair game – for me and for Gruber.

How’s this for a conclusion? The way I do it is the right way. I run the tightest copy in the business – as a point of pride.