Yet if we're to transform aspects of the gay experience from liabilities into assets it's best to start at the beginning. Let's look at how aspects of the gay teen experience can be turned to financial advantage.

Teens struggle for identity; they still embrace their differences. Gay teens can be shown how differences can be the basis for a clear market identity and how strong individual traits can build career positioning that get noticed. these in turn can be the basis of eventual entrepreneurial self-expression.

For the doubly disempowered - as gays and as teens - business can be one of those few level playing fields where not only can we win but where we are courted early on as attractive players. But this requires providing gay-friendly interviewing, internships, placement, and mentoring programs to make this a reality. If that's done we will have built bridges for gay teens to a far more friendly and favorable world than that most experience today.

Teens should take self-tests for entrepreneurial traits to reveal if they have entrepreneurial interests, skills, and knowledge. Very likely they do and if so this in turn can reinforce a strong sense of identity. Entrepreneurship for gays is one solid path to achieve independence in the business world. Mentoring is key and natural. Yet because of teen/adult sex prohibitions it's been a DMZ zone. 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 contact with real life experience we can encourage innovation and tailoring in early teen financial decision-making. By cross-generational examples that show how financial issues play out as the decades of gay life unroll we can provide gay youth perspective and motivation, goals and life-planning.

Real-life examples that show how to survive 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 additional skills now.

It's important that teens see why they are attractive assets to large corporations in the early decades. It's equally important that they spot where and when hidden lavender ceilings can appear in the corporate world.

In the world of gay money, gay teens need additional defenses and they can prosper early if they gear up to take business by storm.

Timing is everything. It's key to do this work before the gay ghetto brandishes its indulgences and lures teens into a replay of adolescence.

The gay teen financial advantage.

Gay teens may be better able to learn these skills than gays who have already entered adult life. Teens may be more motivated than gay adults because they're still terribly aware of our precarious position in society. They may see the world clearly as the alien, hostile place it often is and yet they may not yet have written off life's possibilities. Teens are not yet being lulled into complacency by temporarily elevated discretionary incomes. They may not yet be part of ghetto life. They are still smarting form teen and gay powerlessness. Gay teens may be motivated and ready to seize the financial moment - if they see both the dangers and the opportunities ahead.

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 and not encourage them by default to copy straight models. Untrained and left in straight financial tracks they risk wrecking both their happiness as gay individuals and their financial lives.

If we teach them how to use their unique, early-in-life financial assets to best advantage this can quickly put them into passing gear. 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 hot rods. Customizing society's financial vehicles is what gay teens need and perhaps is the way they can roar into the 20's flat out.