I Wanted to Live Like a White Person: Notes on Being Old, Poor, and Gay

Les K. Wright

When I was a member of the disaffected youth of the 1960s Bob Dylan spoke directly to me through his music.  Fifty years later “Like a Rolling Stone” still speaks to me personally. When I was young the tone of righteous anger resonated for our generation. Wasn’t it misplaced trust in American values, preached but not practiced, when Dylan sang, “Ain’t it hard when you discovered that / He really wasn’t where it’s at / After he took from you everything he could steal?” As my fellow hippies later abandoned their ideals for yuppified material success, I found I had become an outsider— “How does it feel, how does it feel? / To be without a home / Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” As things got harder along my journey through life I came to points where I didn’t “seem so proud / About having to scrounge [my] next meal.” And here the lines that I took most to heart, and still do—“When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose / You’re invisible now; you’ve got no secrets to conceal.”

When the rich and powerful take away everything from the weak and poor, when they have taken “from you everything [they] could steal,” the weak and poor become dangerous. They rise up in anger, their hearts filled with revenge. They have nothing to lose. When I reached the point that I had nothing left to lose, no secrets left to conceal, I also realized that they had plenty of secrets they were concealing. 

As union railroad worker Charles Stallworth recently wrote in an opinion essay in Newsweek, “the elites have stopped hiding their hatred of the working class.” I come from the working class. All my fancy degrees, which Stallworth says “the overeducated elites have in abundance,” did nothing to lift me out of the material realm of my blue-collar roots. As Tanya Gardiner-Scott, an academic colleague and a close personal friend, used to say, “We were trained to appreciate all the beautiful things we would never be able afford.” As the chairperson of my academic department at UC Berkeley, Ken Weisinger, an academic mentor and also a personal friend, told me as I approached my Ph.D. graduation, I would never find a job in academia, but I would have the adornment of my liberal arts education. (He frequently complained to me that his salary as an academic did not allow him to summer in Italy every year and that he had to have his parents pay for this, something he clearly considered he was entitled to.) Now able to adorn my mind with beautiful, high-minded, sublimely inflected thoughts and in my publicly subsidized low-income apartment with tasteful, mostly cheap knock-off furnishings, I am the romantic incarnation of the bohemian scholar. (Poverty is romantic only in literature).

In an article published in 2023 by the HRC called “Understanding Poverty in the LGBTQ+ Community” it was reported that more than one in five of all LGBTQ+ adults currently live in poverty, a percentage notably greater than our straight cisgender counterparts. The more socially marginalized the queer individual is–on the spectrum from gay, white, cisgender men (12%) to transgender Latinx adults (48%) — the greater the percentage of us live in poverty. Older LGBTQ+ people experience poverty at even higher rates. 

Those of us who grew up in poverty—lower-class and working-class families–tend to continue to live in poverty in our adult lives. I was raised in a blue-collar family. My parents’ buying power remained higher than mine with my Ph.D. My parents bought their first house when they were 38. I have never been able to afford to buy a house. They both had a high school diploma. I was the first in my family to attend college. 

Queer people, on average, have higher rates of under- and unemployment. We find work in low-paying fields. Fully 40% of us work in restaurants and food services, hospitals, K-12 education, colleges and universities, and retail. Despite advances in equality we continue to face discrimination. 

This research was collected from data gathered through the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System by Lee Badgett and Bianca Wilson. I met Lee 35 years ago at a conference we both attended as graduate students. She presented a paper demonstrating that gay affluence is a myth. Looking back decades later, I note that Lee’s elite education, culminating with a doctorate in economics, led her to an exemplary academic career. My public university education and doctorate in the humanities required me to reinvent myself as a professor of English and left me struggling in a very low-paying teaching position. My published research in bear history did not open any doors to career advancement.

I want to tease out three strands of how I stumbled on the path that education was supposed to lead me out of poverty. The first was my choice to pursue the humanities. In 1971 when I was a freshman I majored in Comparative Literature, with concentrations in German and Russian. At that time a freshly minted PhD with this skill set was rare and highly employable. By the time I finished my doctorate, having taken time off along the way—two years of late-stage alcoholism, two years exploring other career options, two years of AIDS-related illness and housing instability—the Cold War had ended. The Berlin Wall had fallen. And the Soviet Union had collapsed. What had been strategic languages for American military and diplomatic interests were no longer needed. Both languages stopped being taught in American high schools. Colleges and universities shut down their German and Russian Departments. In the jungle of supply and demand the skill set of people like me was now a big, fat white elephant. The Germans finesse this choice of major as an Orchideenfach—an “orchid major”—pretty to look at but of no practical use.

Secondly, to actually land a tenure-track job in a rarified major, one needed an academic pedigree, preferably from a major research university or an Ivy League school. I earned my degrees at self-styled “public Ivies,” both with a large number of departments in the humanities. They did not offer the professional and informal social connections that a “hothouse” academic like me relied on to get hired. My social ties were with other lower-middle- and working-class students. I would not learn until I began moving in academic circles that the deck is stacked against working-class academics. Although no one would ever say it, we are often seen as interlopers attempting to rise above our station. (Note: the book appearing here retails for $100.)

Instead of playing the game and writing, say, the 1000^th analysis of the early poetry of Goethe, I let my passion guide my research interests. I attempted to write about gay male literature in the age of AIDS. Queer Studies had not yet established itself. Indeed, my academic mentors had all cautioned me against doing gay work before I was tenured somewhere. My project was overly ambitious. The literary critical tools necessary for what I had proposed to do had not yet been developed. I was no genius scholar. Most of the literature I examined were books published by small gay presses. This further ghettoized my work to the scope of what German scholars call Trivialliteratur, roughly what Americans call “pulp fiction.” Ironically, contemporary cultural studies is obsessed with studying such artifacts of pop culture.

My passion for gay studies eventually found a home in gay history. I found my niche as a grassroots historian documenting and publishing bear history. By that time there were scores of positions to teach queer literary theory and gay and lesbian history. But I lacked the formal academic training to teach queer literature. Even as other trail-blazing queer historians had found their way into permanent academic posts, bear history remained a marginalized subfield.

In a conversation I recently had with Perry Brass, the noted GLF gay activist-turned-writer (and my friend) the subject of fame and fortune among our peers came up. In the course of my professional career I had never paid any attention to how we each progressed with our work. But today, in retrospect, I realize our fortunes varied dramatically. As I put it, I didn’t understand why our fairy godmother had not waved her magic wand over me, bestowing fame or fortune as she had with so many of our peers. While so many of my contemporaries are enjoying retirement in comfort, pursuing private dreams, I find myself living in what I call “an artist’s garret” on the edge of the Syracuse University campus.

Thirdly, when Wall Street and Madison Avenue realized gay men and lesbians were an untapped market of potential customers, gay men suddenly became “well-to-do, cosmopolitan, and voraciously consumeristic” in the dream world of advertising. In his article “The Myth of Gay Affluence,” published in The Atlantic, Nathan McDermott debunks the “pernicious insinuation” that gays and lesbians are one of the wealthiest demographics in the United States. While helping to mainstream queer people because of our purchasing power, this consumer capitalist strategy to co-opt gay identity also succeeded in selling this queer version of the American Dream back to us. Sexual self-objectification, physical desirability seen in others, and conspicuous consumption have become the determiners of value within the gay community. “Trolls” and poor queers are largely invisible in the gay community. Old queers are even more invisible. In American culture, poor, old people are typically considered to be unnecessary burdens on society. Some powerful elites have “rebranded” Social Security pensions, which everyone pays for during their working years, as an “entitlement.” Such entitlements are viewed by these elites as undeserved welfare, a drain of public money, and should be taken away, blithely implying poor old people should be left to die in the street. 

And, fourthly, as an aside, the eruption of the AIDS epidemic re-stigmatized gay men in the 1980s, undoing some of the progress toward assimilation and legal equality in the aftermath of Stonewall. Whether having full-blown AIDS or merely suspected of having it, gay men were often fired from our jobs, were evicted from our homes, were turned away by hospitals and funeral parlors. This added another layer of poverty, which many of us PWAs did not recover from. Many of us long-term survivors of AIDS, who did not plan for a retirement we never expected to live to see, now find ourselves in unanticipated poverty in old age. 

My memoir Resilience has been compared to Lars Eighner’s memoir. He wrote eloquently about being homeless. His downward spiral began when a combination of illness and challenges caused by him being gay left him unable to finish his academic training. He later quit his job due to a dispute with a supervisor. After that he was turned away from every job he applied for. In spite of all this, Eighner managed to write his memoir Travels with Lizbeth, which was published by St. Martin’s Press. It was noticed widely, appeared on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, and was even on the New York Times bestseller list. He managed to find a loyal long-term partner and his book catapulted him into fame. Fairy godmother waved her wand over him.

My own life has followed a similar, if not identical, path. I gave up on my effort to find a loyal life partner after both of my last two long-term partners betrayed me, one after the other, getting involved with another man behind my back and leaving me high and dry. I have come close to homelessness, landing on friends’ sofas rather than a park bench or doorway. The fear of homelessness, however, never completely leaves me. As Eighner told a reporter, “I’m pretty much constantly in terror of going back on the streets. It’s like being on a glass staircase. No matter how far up I get, when I look down, I see all the way to the bottom.” 

Today I have a stable home and a productive life, supported by subsidized housing and the generosity of old friends. What keeps me moving forward today is the hope I still have that my fairy godmother will wave her magic wand over me. 

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