How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [16]
Demographer Gary Gates of the Urban Institute in Washington has been tracking the movement of the gay population, especially gay couples, for a few years. It’s true, he told me, that gay men have a different attitude toward urban living and gentrification than do straight folks, and that gay men often lead the way into neighborhoods.
“One of the phenomena,” says Gates, “is that gay men are concentrated in cities. For lack of another way of putting it, gay men tend to live in beautiful places. Why do gay men live in beautiful places with great amenities, such as San Francisco, New York, or Seattle? The short answer is: because they can.”
Despite the recent gay interest in adopting children and raising families, says Gates, “gay men have tended to have a harder time having children. The costs for gay men to have children are higher than for heterosexuals, and the obstacles are higher, too.”
So gay men have been able to divert their resources differently. The amount of disposable income homosexuals have has led to the myth that they make more money than heterosexual men, or that gay couples make more money than heterosexual couples. Not true, says Gates. “They earn less than other men, much less than married men—twelve percent less. Individual gay men are not innately prosperous—education levels are much higher, yet earnings are lower than married men.”
However, when two men “couple,” as Gates puts it, they can often afford more than a heterosexual couple. If gay men live outside the city, they usually live in expensive zip codes. The more expensive a place, the more likely it is to have higher concentrations of gay men—high costs in suburban locations are a better predictor than any other factor for a sizable gay population.
But what about the concentration of gays in cities? Gates and other demographers have data to support what everyone has known for a long time: Gay housing pioneers go to the worst places and then gentrify.
“Of any other coupling types, gay men live in places that have the highest levels of crime, oldest homes, and the highest-rising property values,” says Gates, who has recently published a Gay and Lesbian Atlas. “All three of these factors suggest that gay men are ‘first movers’ into distressed neighborhoods.”
Gates used the demographic term “first movers” to describe gay men in several categories. “First movers” are risk-takers who drive societal trends. For example, gay male couples are much more likely to be interracial or interethnic than straight couples, who are much more homogeneous. “It makes sense,” says Gates. “Gays are willing to move into edgy areas, and also, because the homosexual marriage pool is limited, they are willing to take a chance on a person from a different background.”
Well, if all this was starting to sound like utopia to me—gay couples gentrifying bad neighborhoods and living in interracial harmony—then what I learned next was going to clinch it for sure.
Yes, the homosexuals did really save civilization, because Gates and another researcher have discerned that a high gay population is necessary for a city’s technological savvy and creative output.
In a study, “Technology and Tolerance,” Gates and Richard Florida, a professor from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, put forward an even bolder thesis about the benefits of having homos in the neighborhood. “The leading indicator of a metropolitan area’s high-technology success,” they wrote, “is a large gay population.” They went on to name the top five high-technology areas—San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Austin, Atlanta, and San Diego—all of which have high gay populations. “Gays not only predict the concentration of high-tech industry, they are also a predictor of its growth.”
Wow. Gay men are saving civilization, in a very high-tech way.
What’s more, it seems that Richard Florida, in his research, has been trying to figure out what attracts young heterosexuals to particular jobs and communities. Surprise! It’s gayness and