This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

These are the people that run the world. The words resolve themselves slowly through a haze of pollen and cheap whiskey metabolites. It is a Sunday morning in the spring of DC’s 17th street, the prime meridian of gay privilege in the American capital, and I am distracted from the sobering murk of an Americano and the ink of Prison Notebooks. Across the street from the cafe, a wash of brunching pastels. Accountants, lobbyists, lawyers, Hill staffers, architects seated in pairs and more, delicate with silverware as with conversation. Men in smartly-cut linen and handsome russet leather, broad, confident. They look like the Episcopalians my parents drove me by as a kid Sunday mornings, on the way home from another, poorer congregation.

Through a dull and persistent migraine, with unexpected lucidity, the corollary: We are, all of us, screwed.

And then: How the fuck do those people afford so many Mimosas?

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In the Gay Metropolis, “class” is something that, like AIDS and church, happens to people darker than you. Chances are you’re furrowing a piously liberal brow at the casual racism of the comment, and missing the point altogether. This is instructive. It means the American higher education system discharged its post-Cold War ideological duties admirably, convincing you that race, gender, and sexual orientation are the only ways people get screwed over in the modern world, and that oppression means something on the order of getting left out of your campus hate-speech policy. It means you think urban gay life is a bright post-scarcity playground of upward mobility, one in which you and your friends get to chase dream jobs and gush money on South America trips and townhouse down payments. It means, in short, that you’re a perfectly normal homosexual man, not paying attention to America’s slouch toward Third World exhaustion.

We gay men are permitted poverty the same way we’re permitted unprotected group sex – as a youthful stunt to look back on from the safety of a partner and a Rehoboth time share; something equal parts romantic, dangerous, and shameful; a habit that’s outright uncouth if it goes on too far into your 20s. One or two post-college years of grouphouse living and service economy wage slavery is a cocktail party conversation; longer than that and you risk the polite, distancing incredulity of your peers. The notion that gay men -forsooth, college-educated and white gay men!- might actually face things like “downward mobility” and “structural employability,” just doesn’t register.

It’s not that the gay yuppie bloc are betraying their less fortunate bretheren, in breach of some deep and automatic political solidarity proceeding from our common interest in cock. My point is exactly the opposite: that everyone acts as if our first allegiance should be to other gay men, by virtue of our being gay, even though there is a yawning chasm that divides gay America, a chasm that only continues to widen in the second decade of the 21st century, a chasm that differently defines the lives of the people on either side of it more than their sexuality ever could. Gay men live and talk as if class were some sad and ugly accident to befall a poor cousin, and not the harsh lived reality of throngs of the un- and under-employed that share their gyms, bars and bathhouses.

And they play politics accordingly. To paraphrase a point Adolph Reed recently made on Dough Henwood’s show (require listening, by the way, for everyone reading approvingly): Once 99% of this country’s wealth is controlled by 1% of its people, will we rest content as  long as 10% of them are gay? Is the end-all be-all of identity politics that the queer tribe be represented in a proportional, non-discriminate way in the imminent plutocracy of the Second Gilded Age?

For a Gay Inc. bravely donning formal evening wear and hoisting the champagne flute against the foes of equality, the answer has to be: yes, that’s exactly what we want, you dirty hipster. The Gay Helmsmen captaining the ship of formal policy advocacy, like most of the K Street crowd across the board, can afford to concern themselves with that kind of equality, because they are the class that benefits from it. The Human Rights Campaign’s Joe Solmonese took home more than $300,000 last year. Equality Matters’ Richard Socarides enjoys a less googleable salary, but I’d bet my tax return that the man who spent his post-Clinton years in executive stints at AOL Time Warner and New Line Cinema does alright for himself.  It’s not that these guys haven’t been trained to deliver the right AFL-CIO-approved sound byte when labor comes up at a fundraiser or on a talk show (back in October, Socarides found it in his heart to tell Fox News that Obama should hire his old Clinton White House  buddy Robert Reich to head the National Economic Council.) It’s that, when the dust of K Street mercenary solidarity and liberal politesse settles, these guys have the capital – be it financial, social,or political – to get on with a comfortable life, and too many of the rest of us don’t. Solmonese, Socarides, and the rest of the A-Gay network toe the leftist line because it’s what they get paid to do; some of us are interested in taxing the rich and defending unions because it’s our only shot at a decent future. “Economic justice” advocacy is a sleek resume line for some people in this town, and a dire, ugly, existential necessity for others.

For most urban gay males,  the professional and the political are neatly separable realms: they think of their working lives in terms of  career paths, networking, and merit, and their politics in terms of campaign contributions and polite wine bar conversation. Those of us with less money and more time to read political economy know better: the economy is not like the weather, some chaotic elemental force we have to adjust ourselves to, to be navigated with careerist cunning. The economy is the product of human action, a political arrangement than can be otherwise. “So universities aren’t hiring  - make your peace and settle for a corporate job writing talking points for rich people” declares the voice of conventional wisdom, cynically. “Fuck you and your cowardice – we’ve read enough to know we’re better off without rich people altogether, and are mad enough to do something about it” we hurl back hungrily, too poor to afford cynicism.

The point often confuses the proggie aspirants I argue with over this stuff. It shouldn’t. We understand “interest” in the same way. Neither of us are confused, willfully ignorant, or ideologically blinkered. We just have different interests, and those interests are in conflict. Welcome to History: you wouldn’t be surprised here if you’d spent less of your time as an undergrad learning how to fold a napkin when you have to take a shit at a formal business lunch, and more time reading Marx. We can have wildly divergent outlooks on economic, cultural, and social developments, and neither of us forfeit our rationality; we’re plainly and simply reckoning from objectively different positions, “poor gay” and “rich gay.” If the Ryan plan clears Congress and your tax bracket gets another billion-something-dollar break at the expense of social programs that help keep my scruffy poverty-line ass fed and warm, bully for you.  And if some rich old corporate queen in my neighborhood gets mugged, pistol-whipped, and scared back to Dupont with his partner and twin French bulldogs, I can genuinely and uncomplicatedly approve, because I have as great a stake in warding off white-collar gentrifiers as the Salvadoran family next door (I mean heck, as long as it was for solid class warfare reasons and had nothing to do with homophobia, I’d splurge for a few paint-bombs myself.)

For the first time in history, a third of all American men are out of work. Assuming the iron law of chromosomal assortment and the most conservative Kinsey numbers, this means that there are at least ten million jobless fags out there, roaming museums and bookstores and coffeehouses, their attitudes toward button-downs, facial hair maintenance, and capitalism souring with the passing of each idle week. God knows how many are just squeaking by as doorboys, sales clerks, and bloggers. We can only content ourselves with caffeine and masturbation for so long. The thinning job listings on Idealist.org and Indeed.com make for desperately long stretches of free time, and though the stupid and craven will surely fall to the classically gay political anesthesia of the bar-and-hookup circuit, a few of us are content to trade a day’s wages for a used copy of Gramsci. If that sounds boring to you, you’re probably late for brunch. If not, drop me an email and we’ll talk about a nifty little idea called ” the war of position”…

 

 

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