When does gay make a difference--for you? What counts is gayness in the advice--not gayness in the advisor. Beware when the common bond of gayness is used as a means of getting the fox into the henhouse.

This is especially true for the 90% of all financial advisors who are paid by commissions on investment products. Though they may be gay or gay-friendly, all securities salespeople are susceptible to a greater motivation: the fact that commissions vary widely, depending on the product being promoted. So let's focus on the few financial advisors who are paid by the hour and who cover the entire waterfront of financial advice. Your consultation should cover a far broader domain than that of traditional financial planning. Specifically, the advisor should emphasize the peculiarities of our careers, the uniqueness of our relationships, the double-edged sword of our high disposable incomes, our tax advantages and disadvantages, how best to mix private insurance and corporate benefits, the need for more intense investment begun earlier, and opportunities to make an impact on our community through estate planning.

The first focus should be on relationships, since we often have our own definition of family. We need special forms of security straights can ignore. Unlike legally married hetero couples, we run no risk of divorce settlements, but neither do we have a financial fallback if we break up.

If we're not close to our biological families, we need the security of either a general, durable power of attorney, a medical power of attorney, or a springing power of attorney that can only be used under specific circumstances - or all 3.

Many of us have double incomes and no kids, but our spending tends to rise to those incomes, leaving us vulnerable if half of the income takes a walk. We tend to have minority spending patterns, buying acceptance in a straight consumer society. With high disposable incomes and few constraints, we can have major debt problems.

We need to insure against special risks. If we're sexually active, we need large amounts of life insurance and disability in case of seroconversion or cancer. With this and our high rates of addiction we need stellar medical insurance.

Our careers need management; they're how we generate our cash. Early on we can tolerate high risk, acquiring new skills and jumping jobs. We have an outsider perspective that can translate into creativity. Later on we hit glass ceilings; we don't get raises or promotions since we're perceived as not having families to support. We're often first to be downsized. We're good entrepreneurial material, with street smarts, acting ability, and good social antennae. We can turn those disposable incomes into capital. Yet, if we follow our bliss, we must insure against disability.

Taxwise we suffer no marital exemptions in estate taxes, but we can take individual capital gains exemptions on our homes. We can take advantage of the fact that the IRS doesn't recognize our relationships: We suffer no marriage penalty.

In our youth obsession, we look away from the needs we'll have when we get older. This often means we miss a golden opportunity that's uniquely ours to invest disposable income early, when it can multiply and take advantage of the high returns that come with high-risk growth investments. In addition we're particularly well-suited to benefit from long-term placements in real estate and collectibles, protected from both the need to provide 6-figure outflows for kids and college educations and from the financial disruption of divorce.

And if we do all this right, we have an exciting chance to make an inspired 'e-statement' of our life's work, endowing those things we value and believe in, fostering the fragile community that nurtured our special natures as gay people.

Because these differences are so basic, our gay financial advisor should offer highly specific advice--not a computer- generated plan embedded with assumptions about 2.5 kids, college education and divorce settlements. We need to shelve the standard solutions and translate the armamentarium of personal finance books into tools and techniques that are tailored to our dreams, our needs, our problems, our opportunities.