In the past, the violence experienced by gay teens has often undermined gay financial foundations. It doesn't have to be like that - since the damage is due to gay circumstances, not gay characteristics. Pinpointing and correcting those circumstances may allow us a chance to prevent or correct the damage early.

Later we'll assess how these factors threaten gay financial survival. First let's see what sets off gay differences from other teen differences and explore how the gay "difference dynamic" can impact gay teens.

The gay difference dynamic

Being different is perhaps a defining characteristic of the teen experience. Many teens feel so different they wonder if they'll ever be part of any group. The double task of the teen years is individualization and socialization - a long process of balancing individual and social needs, conformity and identity.

What's different for gays? Our differences are invisible. We usually let them show only if it's safe. If it's not, our gayness goes underground - and that part of us isn't socialized the same way. Our gayness then has little chance to be expressed, tested, compared, refined, developed - and finally chosen, accepted and embraced as part of our self.

We have the option of deferring the gay part of our becoming part of society. And while that may give short-term safety gains, it can cost us dearly in developmental delays and distortions - and in how we look at life financially. For example, we may decide that our gay stuff is personal and that financial/business stuff is straight turf - and turn off to money matters as ungay and uncool.

If our gayness is in limbo we may put off our teen agenda of unresolved gay issues into the 20s - when we're "legal" and have independence. But acting out as an adult adolescent can wreak havoc financially - or at the least delay our financial progress during key years.

Why are they key? Because our discretionary income, risk-taking ability, networking, and mobility are highest in our early years. That's why it's best financially to work out our difference of being gay in the world in the teens, not the 20s. That means coming out as much as we can frees us more to participate financially in the world when we're at our greatest advantage. Yet this may be difficult - or truly unsafe - given the violence gay teens often encounter.

Violence against gay teens

Of all the liabilities described on the gay balance sheet, violence impacts teens the most. Our other liabilities come later. Much financial discrimination is exercised against gays in later years when higher incomes are at stake.

Teens may suffer more profoundly the various forms of violence against gays. Teens are less defended against society; they are often virtual prisoners in families; they have few protective rules or restraints with peers.

If untreated, the violence gay teens experience, fear, and feel may embed itself so deeply in financial assumptions, attitudes, and expectations that only long years of therapy, ghetto life, and coming out may offset them. If assumptions, attitudes and expectations are the very foundation of financial action - and success - gays risk incurring severe handicaps in teen years.

Society's violence

No matter how protected a specific individual may be, society's media remind us constantly of how gays can suffer at the hands of others. Violence against gays is real - from medieval times through the holocaust to today. Our very history has been erased. Our media images are largely negative. The rantings of the religious right are loud & clear. Surveys show that 1/3 of doctors and psychiatrists still believe we're sick or should be barred from certain occupations. Our teachers sometimes fear for their jobs if they encourage teens. Potential mentors fear criminal penalties from involvement with teens. Laws declare our love-making to be illegal. Now we have seemingly rational genocidal discussions of doing away with babies which have "the gay gene."

What's different about gays vs. other minorities? Our very right to exist is still subject to debate. We poke our heads out of our closet foxholes at our own risk.

Family violence

Families will remain by definition heterosexual until the time that society encourages us to form families and have children. Until then most families will unthinkingly impose heterosexuality as the norm. Nuclear, pressure-cooker families tend to force gays underground. This alone can be enough to keep us in the closet.

Statistics paint a worse picture. Studies report continuing patterns of family rejection when sexual orientation is disclosed. One study reports supportive mothers only 20% of the time and supportive fathers only 10% of the time.

If written off this way, many gays in turn write off family financial fights as irrelevant to them - though these are often one way parents communicate financial values to their children.

Peer violence

Teens often rely more on peers than on family. Yet more than 40% of gay teens who come out to friends report loss of the friendship. It's no wonder that high percentages of gay youth often report deteriorating school performance and drop-out rates are approaching 30%.

Heterosexuals have much practice in Dating Finance 101 - yet we typically don't date. This is unfortunate financially since dating can be a long, in-depth, no-holds-barred workshop on relationship, competition, persistence, differences, responsibility, and the costs of coupling.

The fact that in today's America 4 out of 10 women have children by age 20 puts many heterosexuals behind the eight-ball financially. Heterosexuals learn key financial lessons and get financially motivated based on the cost of parenting by relating to the experience of friends in pregnancy false alarms, abortions, teen mothers, and teen marriages. The possibility of children heightens many of their financial priorities and decisions - whether they decide to have children or not. And they learn all this before they start their work lives. Few gays relate to what's being learned financially by our heterosexual peers.

Worse, many straight teens, unsure of their sexuality or experiencing bisexual feelings, may resort to all forms of violence against open or perceived gays rather than deal with their own perhaps ambivalent feelings. Most gay bashers are in their teens or early 20s.

The result is that many gays write off finance and business as straight stuff - and silently assert their gay identity by erasing any interest in finance, business - or even the future. The surplus of spendable income in early adult years in the gay ghetto furthers this myth until it is too late or too costly to correct it.

Self-violence

When society, family & friends fail teens, teens may just leave home. In Los Angeles, 25 to 35 percent of street youth are estimated to be gay; in Seattle the estimate is 40 percent. Of the half-million estimated homeless youth, gay teens may number 150,000-200,000.

Even government figures calculate that gay and lesbian youth are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than other youth and may comprise up to 30 percent of completed suicides by all youth. A Canadian study of gay youth gives estimates that are much higher.

Without socialization from family & friends and with distrust of society & public authorities, gay teens may seek acceptance and relationships more directly - through sex. With sex as a major way to connect more than 60% of gay youth practice unsafe sex - and that 25% of new HIV cases are gay teens.

Feeling written off by family, friends, and authorities, gay youth escape through alcohol and drugs - at abuse rates that are three times the average.

The financial fallout from all this can cripple gays financially even before they start adult life.

The gay gauntlet

Yes, the gay teens can seem like a gay gauntlet. Yet some not only survive this ordeal but counter it by pursuing achievement. But this nobility has a price - an equally distorted financial world view that financial success depends more on heroic effort than on routines and "A-Gay" attitudes built on acquiring society's symbols of success.

Violence can push some of us back into indulging and escaping ourselves while it pushes others forward into denying and proving ourselves. But often the best tests of financial mettle are those devised by ourselves, at our own pace, towards our own purpose - not those triggered by others, overwhelmingly telescoped, and desperate in their measures.

As long as gays die by the hands of others or by their own hands, we have a problem that has a long financial shadow. Like a toxic dump its problems may not appear for decades. Its financial fallout, disguised during paradisiacal 20s and 30s, eats away our financial bone and marrow.

Coping with the Terrible Teens Legacy

Repairing our financial foundations early is cheaper and easier rather than facing the damage later. What can be done?

Anti-violence and conflict-resolution training works. Peer education works. So does providing safe space for gay teens to gather and equipping them with counseling resources. Early mentoring can solve a lot of the problem.

Individually, coming out is key. It can be very rough but all teen identity finding is rough - and this is the time to do it, not later. The earlier that reality testing can start without loss of life or limb, the less behind financially we'll be.

Our goal is to create a safe context to come out in the teens. Then we can build both self-esteem and hard monetary muscle that will enabling us to hit the ground of the 20s running.

Why focus on personal finance?

Most teens are poor - the result of missing adult rights, child-labor laws, and missing experience & training.

Equipping gay teens financially empowers them. Money is a good starting point with teens for money is clearly associated by many teens with security, status, and power.

Money matters are an especially attractive leverage point with gay teens since gay financial advantages occur early in life - with our high discretionary income, entrepreneurial traits, networking, and mobility. This is finally a game we can win - by training teens how to play it well.

Let's teach gay teens that the 20s are not just a safe playing field financially, but one where we're at an advantage. If we spend time in our financial gyms, do reps in risk-taking, bulk up our savings, bench press our careers, build investment muscle, spot each other in our financial decision-making, and simply spend time imagining our financial future we can win our financial freedom.

Let's give gay youth a future financial agenda they're sure to win rather than asking them to solve the problems of centuries past. We can empower the gay community with a generation of secure, confident, and successful gay people. Then we can work our broader social agenda together.

Gay Finance 101

Knowledge has rapidly supplanted labor and capital as the basis of financial power.

Our first money lesson is that time financially is our friend. If civilization is the art of seeing future results from present actions, the compounding of savings and multiplication of investment can give gay teens a future to look forward to. Time is on our side - if we but save and invest - especially for gays whose investment timelines are relatively uninterrupted.

Today's calculators and computers can make the lessons of personal finance easy and personal financial goals immediate in ways that technically weren't possible even ten years ago. Programs that contrast the accumulation wealth with the sheer spending of income drive home the point. Little teaching is needed when we can show the future results of present action so concretely - and when so much discretionary income is at stake.

Revealing how financial issues differ for gays not only enables gay teens to not only acquire and practice a healthy financial skepticism from the outset but may help in identifying skills, knowledge, and resources needed throughout life.

All this is may encourage the development of a unique, strong identity - which any minority needs throughout life. It's empowering to show in hard dollars how a 20-year old can achieve financial independence by midlife. People wake up to finances when they realize that managing their money is not just a second career but one where they're in control of their own lives - subject only to the market. Teens may be surprised to find out that money management is a skill that can eventually accumulate more total wealth than the total income they may otherwise earn through their jobs.

Gay Entrepreneurship 101

Gay teens can be shown how gay differences and the 10% role can translate into a clear market identity and strong individual traits - and how these can be the basis of entrepreneurial self-expression. Self-administered inventories of entrepreneurial traits may quickly reveal not only interests, skills, and knowledge - but can build a strong sense of identity and how to achieve independence in the business world. It's especially important to do this work before the gay ghetto brandishes its indulgences - and lures into a repeat of adolescence.

Gay teens can discover business as a level playing field where not only we can win but where we are seen as attractive players. By providing gay-friendly interviewing, internships, placement, and mentoring programs we will build bridges for gay teens to a far more friendly and favorable world than that most teens now experience.

We need programs that provide structures to protect both mentor and mentee so that gay teens can tap into the power of gay networking early. Most older gays do not have children; here's a chance for them to help - and be helped - by youth. By demonstrating through real people how financial issues emerge as the decades of gay life unroll we can provide gay youth perspective and motivation, goals and life-planning. By providing examples of how gays redefine coupleship financially we can encourage innovation and tailoring in early teen financial decision-making.

It is especially important that teens see why they are attractive assets to large corporations in the early decades - and that they spot where hidden lavender ceilings lie in the corporate world. Real-life examples of intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial solutions to surviving as an openly gay person in business may motivate gay teens to explore career options more thoroughly, to chose employers more carefully, and to acquire skills now.

The gay teen financial advantage

Gay teens may have be better able to learn these skills than gays who have already entered adult life. Teens may also be more motivated - terribly aware of our precarious position in society. They may see the world clearly as the alien, hostile place it often is. Teens are not yet be lulled into complacency by temporarily elevated discretionary incomes. They may not yet be part of ghetto life. They are still smarting from teen and gay powerlessness. Gay teens may be motivated and ready to seize the moment - if it has enough promise in it.

Teens in general are not formally trained in personal finance - perhaps because the 90% lives in a world already mapped out with assumptions, rules, and expectations. Straight teens often run financially on automatic.

Because gay money issues are different, we need to offer gay teens the equivalent of a financial stick shift. This can quickly put them into passing gear if we teach them how to use their unique, early-in-life financial powers assets to best advantage. Untrained they risk wrecking their financial lives. With good guidance, the right tools, in a gay friendly financial space, gay teens can recast assumptions, apply old rules in new ways, and create their own financial dream cars. Customizing society's financial vehicles is what gay teens need and the way can they can roar into the 20s flat out.

The bonus of a financial education

If gay teens discover the financial power of time - how present actions can spell financial ruin or create wealth - they may apply financial thinking to unsafe sex and addiction.

Most teens are poor but in prime health. They may relate far more to the consequences of being poor than that of falling ill when it comes to HIV. The financial insult of injury is sometimes more frightening than its injuries. Tabulating the sheer career, income, and wealth costs of HIV can be very persuasive. (See "Sex as a Financial Proposition" in the chapter on Financial Health and Illness.)

Let's start gay teen education where there may be the most interest and where it may literally count the most - with financial empowerment. These fundamental financial learnings may in turn lead to larger understandings.

Why finance is key

The grandfather of developmental psychology, Erik Erikson, identified key tasks for each decade of life. As in finance his model is progressive; failure to complete a task at any one stage condemns us to confronting its issues later. Erikson described these basic life choices over the decades:

• 0-10 Basic trust vs mistrust
• 10-20 Autonomy vs shame
• 20-30 Initiative vs guilt
• 30-40 Industry vs inferiority
• 40-50 Identity vs confusion
• 50-60 Intimacy vs isolation
• 60-70 Generativity vs stagnation
• 70-80 Integrity vs despair

Before age 20 many gays are in danger of already dropping behind on the first two issues. While gay teens may not be able to change society, family, or friends, they can build a firm sense of trust and autonomy through financial empowerment. This foundation will serve them well as they enter the 20s. Discovering how money can be gay may give a new practical meaning to the phrase gay liberation.