Because we are seen as independent even when coupled we should now consider seriously the tax advantages of incorporation or creating our own businesses - especially since tax laws lock employees into high tax brackets with little relief.

Our flexibility and independence make us much better suited for the entrepreneurial directions society in moving in. We're better able to handle the new trends of rapid career change, multiple jobs, job sharing, electronic cottages, independent contracting, employee leasing - and we may save taxes in the process. Remember: the tax system in the US favors ownership, whether that be of a home, business, or stock. Now that the oomph has gone out of home ownership, financial growth is in having your own business and actively managing your own investments.

We have a greater incentive to master the complexities of a life of deductions with a bonus of independence. Our networking leads naturally to mutually beneficial financial relationships.

Properly designed, we can even invent businesses that do well by doing good by specifically serving the gay & lesbian community. These businesses pay the dividend of knowing we are truly taking care of our own and the bonus of circulating more of our dollars among our own.

The rendering of services by a partner with lower income to the business of a wealthier partner both shifts income into a lower tax bracket and provides a deduction for the business. A partner can be made a director of a corporation enabling board. Under certain circumstances, this can permit board or sales meetings to be held in vacation-like surroundings as long as the IRS rules about meeting deductibility are met. Investment into a partner's career, skills, or pet project can be structured to maximize deductions yet provide protections to the investor at the same time.

In fact, the new ideal coupleship may be where one partner is employed with the resources of a large corporation, including domestic partnership benefits, and where the other partner is self-employed, with the deductions, freedoms and opportunities for self-expression that go with entrepreneurship. This is especially true since some of us thrive on structured employment and others of us prosper in entrepreneurial activity; there is no one path.

Eventually the entrepreneurial partner may be the couple's pioneer, leading them into which might be termed an "entrepreneurial relationship" where they can relate professionally as well as personally, where financial advantages add to the other advantages of being a gay or lesbian in today's rapidly changing work world.

We've already had to be entrepreneurs in navigating life. Few of us have the children and nonworking spouses that often force married straights to seek corporate employment - and pay today's increasingly stiff price of employment in increasingly scarce job security, lower deductions, and increased taxes.

Tax advantages may be the added factor we need to trade in the immediate risk of having a single employer for the longer-term security of having multiple clients. As a start, we may have the opportunity to propose part-time contracts with present employers, enabling us to launch a firm with at least one major client.

Now may be the time to rewrite our jobs into independent contractual relationships in turn permitting deductions for travel, meals, professional development, home offices. (Seek tax and legal counsel when you start; for example, a home office may flag you for an audit unless properly set up.)

This move out of the corporate closet can simultaneously give us the freedom and flexibility to be who we truly are - and to walk away from the apologies, compromises, or internalized homophobia of the workplace towards a literally more rewarding, less taxed future.