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This morning I was reading a very interesting book by Mary Virginia Lee Badgett called Money, Myths, and Change which effectively questions the assumptions that society have of the affluent queer.  The affluent queer is basically a product of marketing surveys from commonly read periodicals which indicate that gay consumers are wealthy and educated.  For anybody with extensive experience of both the activist communities, services for gays and the commercial scene will know is that this clashes hard with a lot of the community which often (but again, not always) appears to be quite marginalised.  At the same time, I would personally question the counter-assumption that gays are fundamentally deprived (though I definitely think there is a very strong argument in her case that the closet can be just as discriminated against despite taking action to conceal their sexuality since they may have great difficulty in fitting into any society).

An interesting anomaly that Badgett finds is that when matching like-for-like in terms of educational attainment, location, etc, gay men earn significantly less than heterosexuals, while on the whole gay women earn considerably more.  She makes a lot of effort to figure out which this discrepancy exists, though I suspect that, correctly, she identifies that lesbians are less like to have a male partner which would lead to pressure to have children and not work.  Or more to the point, only 20-30% of self-identified gay women have children as compared to 70-50% of hetero women, which means that they will have a more continuous work record uninterrupted by child-bearing periods in their lives.  I suspect that most lesbians who consciously co-parent are in most cases considerably more affluent than hetero women who consciously have children with a married or unmarried male partner.  While there are a minority of dependent lesbians, this is probably less so than gay males who have a long standing tradition of looking for older male breadwinners, especially if the younger partner dropped out of education or worked in the sex trade.  That is not to say that lesbians don't work in the sex trade - I am sure a few do, but represent a minority there.

That said, there would be a significant element of economically inactive lone parents amongst gay women who have children from previous heterosexual relationships - however - most of these are far more likely to be in the closet and so not represented in surveys on income.  What I find curiously interesting though, is an extensive discussion on the effects of indirect discrimination on gay folk who are still in the closet.  As the book points out, many will be unable to fully mix with colleagues because it would require disclosure, and this could disadvantage them at work.  We find particularly amusing on the scene here, the particularly ghettoized phenomenon we call the "ManDyke" - hyper butch gay women who often turns out to be in the closet (or more correctly, believes themselves to be in the closet!!)  These turn up all over the place, for example an ex of mine spotted one in the factory where she works, where groups of mostly male workers groups together and spit fire over "dykes."  Some will be spotted by colleagues and potentially discriminated against, others may even be discriminated against for "looking dykey" even though they may not in fact be at all.  Others may not be spotted, or will be able to "work the system" to their advantage (the ex appears to have managed this, but perhaps not).

For gay men this may depend on the sector in which they work.  For example, a considerable number in Ireland either work in retail/services, but a very large proportion work in US multinationals, often in fairly skilled roles in non-production workplaces, rather than Ireland's overinflated construction sector, which is known to be not only enormously homophobic, but frequently unskilled.  Either way there is an interesting debate there about who we are and where we are in life.