The pandemic has made life especially miserable for LGBTQ people
From food insecurity to housing uncertainty, the coronavirus has done a number on the economic outlook for queer folks. Plus: A must-see documentary that you’ll enjoy even if you’re not a sports fan.
There’s no doubt that the pandemic has had a material effect on all of us. But people from marginalized groups, including the LGBTQ communities, have been hit the hardest, as a new survey from the Census Bureau revealed.
According to the data, 13 percent of LGBTQ adults lived in a household where there was sometimes or often not enough to eat in the past seven days, compared to 7.2 percent of non-LGBTQ adults. “Food insecurity is when someone doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from,” Emilio Tavarez, director of advocacy and policy for Hunger-Free America, said during a podcast episode produced by the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement and Research in May. “Even in adults and students, if you are in class or at work and you’re trying to concentrate and you can’t because all you’re thinking about is ‘I want to go to lunch’ but you’re not sure as to how you’re going to get it or trying to think about, ‘Well, how much money do I dedicate to getting my lunch’ while you’re trying to focus at work — that is a symptom of food insecurity.” Tavarez said that people often misunderstand food insecurity as out-blown hunger. “And it can be — it is way less — it is closer to home than most people think.”
In a June 2020 study by the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law that conducts rigorous, independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, LGBTQ respondents mentioned lack of transportation and housing (with a kitchen and places to store food) were key barriers to being able to use charitable food services. And respondents in rural and nonurban are often limited to mostly religious-affiliated food services. Many participants expressed concerns about potential LGBTQ-related rejection from these religiously affiliated services. There’s also an emotional toll taken by using these programs: If they had housing adequate for storing and cooking food and comfort with the program environment, which indicates access to food programs is about more than whether people can find the services or get the benefits.
The Census Bureau survey also reported 36.6 percent of LGBTQ adults lived in a household that had difficulty paying for usual household expenses in the previous seven days, compared with 26.1 percent of their non-LGBTQ counterparts. And nearly one in five LGBTQ adults lived in a household with lost employment income in the past four weeks, compared to 16.7 percent of non-LGBTQ adults. Plus, among those living in homes that were rented or owned with a mortgage or loan, 8.2 percent of LGBTQ adults said they were not at all confident that their household will be able to make their next housing payment on time, compared to six percent of non-LGBTQ adults.
This is dreadful news for LGBTQ adults because discrimination is pervasive in the housing market. Just 21 states and the District of Columbia have laws prohibiting housing discrimination based on sexual orientation. And according to the Urban Institute, even though hundreds of cities have passed nondiscrimination laws, including jurisdictions in states without protective laws, LGBTQ people still experience unjust or prejudicial treatment based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Meanwhile, in places with no such laws, LGBTQ people looking for housing have little or no legal recourse to combat discrimination. The result? Diminished access to schools, transportation, and other resources that foster economic and social prosperity for this population.
The LGBTQ community is a rich source of creativity across the arts and entertainment. But as you’ve read me write before, it can feel impossible to bet on your skills and ingenuity when you lack the safety net to provide a soft landing in case of emergency. And our culture, politics and economy are worse off because of it.
These issues exist because as Dylan Matthews wrote in an article for Vox I linked in yesterday’s Read All About It, poverty is a policy choice. Some lawmakers in the House and Senate have worked to move us forward. During the Trump administration, lawmakers attempted to expand protections under the Fair Housing Act in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit housing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. They also reintroduced legislation that would add nondiscrimination protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity to civil rights laws pertaining to employment, housing, credit, federally funded programs including education and federal jury service. But these efforts have stalled up to now.
So if LGBTQ equity and inclusion are valuable to you, then make sure they’re also top of mind for the elected officials who will come asking for your votes during next year’s midterms. Because politicians move differently when they know they’ll be held accountable for the well-being of those around the margins, not just the people who have historically been at the center of our country’s consciousness.
Coronavirus
The FDA authorized booster shots for people with compromised immune systems. The emergency use expansion will cover people who have had solid organ transplants and others whose immune systems are similarly compromised and is an effort to protect immunocompromised from the highly contagious Delta variant that’s sweeping the country. [Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland / NYT]
The largest teacher’s union in the country supports vaccine and testing mandates. “As we enter a new school year amidst a rapidly spreading Delta variant and lagging public vaccination rates, it is clear that the vaccination of those eligible is one of the most effective ways to keep schools safe, and they must be coupled with other proven mitigation strategies,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, which represents more than three million teachers and school faculty members, said in a statement. [Erin Doherty / Axios]
Politics
President Biden called on Congress to lower prescription drug costs. Americans pay two to three times as much as people in other countries for prescription drugs, and one in four Americans who take prescription drugs struggle to afford their medications, according to the White House. The administration specifically is seeking legislation that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, which would significantly reduce costs. [The White House]
Nancy Pelosi won’t hold a vote on the infrastructure bill this month. The Speaker of the House told Democrats on a call yesterday that she’s sticking with her plan to vote on the deal on roads, bridges, transit and broadband that the Senate passed this week at the same time as the budget blueprint, which includes provisions on health care, education and climate change. The politics on this are simple: Both bills will probably fail if Pelosi doesn’t bring them up at the same time. She said as much on the call too: “I am not freelancing. This is the consensus of the caucus.” [Scott Wong and Mike Lillis / The Hill]
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee introduced the Open Markets Act yesterday, which would impose new rules on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The goal of the bipartisan bill is to boost competition and consumer protections by placing new restrictions on how the stores operate and what rules they can impose on app developers. [John D. McKinnon / WSJ]
Almost one in five states have enacted laws that shift election-related responsibilities from state authorities to state legislatures or biased election boards. Each law was enacted by a Republican governor or by Republican-controlled legislatures voting to override Democratic governors’ vetoes. [Quinn Scanlan / ABC News]
Related: Texas Senate Republicans passed a voting restriction bill after a 15-hour delay from a Houston Democratic senator, known as a filibuster, ended. Now the legislation goes to the Texas House, where state Democrats, who have successfully blocked a vote on the measure twice, are running out of options to prevent its passage. [Alexa Ura / Texas Tribune]
Business
Amazon plans to prevent data breaches by monitoring the keyboard and mouse strokes of its customer service workers. The move is to reduce the amount of customer data theft from rogue workers, imposters and hackers. These tactics are likely to blur worker privacy lines and are designed to bring down stolen customer data to zero cases by 2022. [Joseph Cox / Vice News]
Creators are decamping to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram after Snapchat reneged on its commitment to pay out $1 million per day for high-performing short-form videos. The company said it restructured its payout program to enable it to support niche creators instead of determining payment based solely on single-video engagement. [Salvador Rodriguez and Jessica Bursztynsky]
The New York Times introduced a premium portfolio of 18 new and existing subscriber-only newsletters to compete with independent publishing apps like Substack. The Times is betting on the allure of its institutional resources — including a massive audience of readers, editing, legal and fact-checking support, and promotion and marketing teams. {Disclosure: Substack provides the publishing technology for The Supercreator.) [Sara Fischer / Axios]
Technology
TikTok will limit push notifications for teens to make the app less addictive. Younger teens ages 13 to 15 won’t receive notifications after 9 p.m., while 16- and 17-year-olds won’t receive notifications after 10 p.m. The notifications will resume at 8 a.m. the following morning. The company also announced other updates to prioritize teen safety, including increased protections against online abuse and sexual violence. [Sarah Perez / TechCrunch]
Twitter redesigned its web and mobile apps. Apparently, people hate the new font (I actually don’t mind it!) and the black and white follow buttons. [Gael Fashingbauer Cooper / CNET]
Culture
Heidi Montag, formerly of the 2000s MTV reality hit The Hills, thinks her costar Lauren Conrad “should be so rich. “I feel like Lauren didn’t make it like she should have. She should be Kylie [Jenner]. She was so good at makeup, she should have done the tutorials. If she had a good team, she’d be a billionaire. She’d be a hundred-millionaire,” Montag said on the latest episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. As my friend Chasity tweeted, “It’s definitely 2005 all over again.” Let’s cut the tension with some ‘Tasha Bedingfeld, shall we? [Cole Delbyck / HuffPost]
Read All About It
Leah Wright Rigueur at The Atlantic on Black motherhood:
For many people, though, a Black mother choosing joy is in stark contrast to the mostprominentstories about Black motherhood. Throughout generations, society has rendered Black mothers dangerous—just think of the American mythology surrounding the so-called menace of the pathological Black matriarch of the 1960s, the treacherous welfare queen of the 1970s, and the drug-addled crack mother (and her babies) of the 1980s. In her groundbreaking 1998 book, Killing the Black Body, the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts observes that “white childbearing is generally thought to be a beneficial activity: it brings personal joy and allows the nation to flourish.” Black mothers, however, are seen as harmful degenerates and a drain on the nation—a group to be controlled and disciplined. Even within Black communities themselves, as Eva C. Haldane, a 39-year-old doula from Windsor, Connecticut, relayed to me during a Zoom interview, there are confining boundaries around what constitutes authentic and acceptable motherhood. Black mothers’ private lives are consistently subjected to public surveillance, scrutiny, and judgment, as if to suggest that these women cannot be trusted to be responsible for themselves, or that they are unfit for motherhood.
Sarah Jones at Intelligencer on political stan culture:
[Andrew] Cuomo wasn’t a very good governor, at least not by progressive standards, and evidence suggests he isn’t a good person, either. His downfall is thus a lesson for the Cuomosexual, or for anyone who’s tweeted “slay, queen” about Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi within the last five years. There can be good reasons to admire a politician’s life or career. But temper that admiration with caution. Politicians are just people, perhaps even more flawed than the rest of us, and power, once achieved, comes with its own obligations. Politicians owe something to us, in ways that other celebrities do not, and democracy only functions when we hold them accountable. The demise of Cuomo ought to be the end not just of the Cuomosexual, but of the benighted political stan culture that produced the very concept. Grow up and put the sweaters away: Politicians are a means to an end. They exist to be replaced when they are unethical or no longer useful to progress. There are fights to win, and no time to waste.
Li Jin at Li’s Newsletter on why the “creator economy” is in crisis:
But just as the gig economy mode of work brought about negative consequences, strong parallels are emerging between the gig economy and creator economy, rooted in the commoditization of work and erosion of worker leverage. For online creators today, a handful of large social media platforms serve as gatekeepers for finding and connecting with audiences. While these platforms provide valuable services to creators, including the tools for content creation, hosting, and discovery, there is an immense power imbalance between platforms and creators, who are reliant on platforms for distribution.
As we’ve traveled up the adoption S-curve, social media platforms have shifted from supporting creator individuality to commoditizing creators in order to maintain their grasp on user attention, a necessary ingredient for advertising-based business models. This dynamic undermines creator success and independence, making the creator economy just as corrosive for online workers as the gig economy.
Numerous startups are attempting to help creators set up their standalone, owned properties online; earn more from fewer, truer fans; and lessen their dependence on social media platforms. But unless we radically change the foundation of the creator economy—how creators find and connect to a community in the first place—these solutions are incremental at best, and don’t create a fundamental unlock for the issues plaguing the current creator economy.
Chavi Eve Karkowsky at The Atlantic on compassion fatigue:
Unlike during the pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, the current upsurge of suffering isn’t one that humanity has to go through. People are choosing it. And intent matters. Intent is the difference between a child who goes hungry because their parent can’t afford dinner and the one who goes hungry because their parent won’t buy them dinner. Having the ability to provide relief but not do so is cruel. To many medical providers working today, the rejection of lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines feels like a giant “Fuck you” from 29 percent of American adults . We will keep providing the best care possible, but they are making our job much harder.
Not all health-care workers agree, of course. Plenty of hospital workers remain unvaccinated, and some have even staged protests against hospital-wide vaccine mandates. But most of us got vaccinated, and we’ll go to work tomorrow and the next day, no matter what. We will start IVs and give medicines and intubate patients no matter what bumper sticker is on their car. We are holding up our end of a bargain with society. But is society fulfilling its end?
The pandemic has taken away so much: millions of jobs, more than a year of education for tens of millions of children, more than 600,000 American lives. Amid this new, largely preventable wave of infections, some health-care providers are losing something else: the belief that all of us can come together as a people to solve a problem. Doing the work of curing human bodies is harder when some of one’s faith in humanity is lost.
Dave Holmes at Esquire on America’s reaction to mask mandates:
What we are seeing here is the death rattle for a certain kind of American thinking, or more accurately, a certain kind of American feeling. We have always felt more secure facing the kinds of problems we can shoot, threaten, punch or spend our way out of. Got a stubborn problem? Drop a bomb on it. No more; we have finally faced an enemy that can only be defeated by empathy, by selflessness, by prioritizing the common good above our own personal comfort. We can only move past this moment by listening to the guidance of people who have spent a lot of time studying. We must defer to guys we could take in a fight, or even worse: women.
Kate Aronoff at The New Republic on Sen. Joe Manchin’s lame reason for opposing more infrastructure spending:
In any case, cars and gas costing more doesn’t mean you’ll have to pay $10 for a banana by September or burn bank notes by the cartload, Weimar-style, for warmth at Thanksgiving. The evidence that the U.S. economy is overheated boils down to it being more expensive than it was a year ago to buy a 2017 Toyota Corolla. The evidence that the planet is overheated includes entire townsbeing zapped off the map in California and another week of well over 100 degree temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, not to mention hundreds dying in floods in central China, devastating landslides in India, and the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. When Joe Manchin tweets that he’s concerned about the “fiscal policy future of this country,” he’s saying he thinks the price of a Corolla is more important than mass death.
Michael’s Pick
Untold: Malice at the Palace: Even if you’re not into sports, you’ll still find this Netflix documentary on one of the grossest displays of fan abuse as a case study for how the media covers Black athletes.