uptown rat

Even if you guys don’t admit it, we all know that white gays think that gayness is centered around whiteness, and that people of color are inherently homophobic and transphobic. I’ve always been aware of this orientalist binary that white LGBT people construct, between the “progressive” cultures of the West and the “regressive” cultures of the East, between white people who are intrinsically either gay (victims) or progressives (willing to learn) and nonwhite people who are static, barbaric homophobes, never moving forward. We all know that white gays think only they are capable of being gay or trans. Even if they don’t admit it, their entire lens of gayness is filtered through whiteness, thorugh eurocentrism, through orientalism/antiblackness/racism/antisemitism/islamophobia/etc. 

This is incredibly obvious when you look at what white gays consider to be “good” LGBT representation in films versus bad or mediocre representation. 

We’re not just talking about what random white kids on tumblr want to watch. We’re talking about how white critics leave rave reviews about frankly mediocre white LGBT films, while mocking and picking apart and ignoring nonwhite LGBT films. We’re talking about how rich white gay celebrities will pay for movie screenings and will relentlessly advertise those movies on their social media platforms, while giving dust to nonwhite LGBT films (unless those films happen to get critical acclaim, at which point they give a meager shoutout, as if they’d always been caping for those films). We’re talking about which LGBT films The Academy picks for its Oscar nominations versus which ones it habitually leaves by the wayside. We’re talking about, in short, which narratives receive consistent commercial and critical acclaim alike, in spite of narrative flaws or repetition or mediocrity, and which ones don’t receive anything, despite originality or creativity or phenomenal acting. 

I’ve seen people say that you can’t “compare” films like Moonlight or The Handmaiden (the former featuring a dark-skinned Black gay man, whose lover is an Afrolatino bisexual man, and the latter featuring two East Asian lesbians) to Love Simon or Carol. Why lump Love Simon and Carol in the same category, knowing that those two movies are as different from each other as they are different from Moonlight or The Handmaiden, and as if Moonlight and The Handmaiden aren’t also incredibly different from each other? Even in an argument like that, white people are showing that they think LGBT representation is only good if it serves their interests and needs. 

I’ve then seen people talk about “accessibility”, and this is what really gets me. Yes, Moonlight and The Handmaiden feature adult content, whereas Love Simon is family-oriented. No one is saying that 15 year olds have to go watch Moonlight right now. But the fact of the matter is, you all also lapped up Carol and Blue is the Warmest color! You all are already salivating over The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which is about conversion therapy, a topic that is incredibly graphic and triggering. But because TMCP features a white lesbian narrative, it’s palatable, despite its “mature content”. Or what about Thelma, which white wlw tumblr hypes up? Is action and science-fiction content perfect for 10 year olds to watch? 

Also yes, some of these films aren’t readily available. BUT THAT’S THE POINT. Listen, most indie LGBT films are only shown in select theaters in the first place. But again, Love Simon was a commercial hit, which means it could be shown in more theaters. Moonlight was shown in very select theaters at first, AND THE ONLY REASON IT WAS RE-SCREENED IN MORE THEATERS IS BECAUSE CRITICS FINALLY WOKE UP AND SAW HOW GENUINELY GOOD IT WAS. If Moonlight wasn’t critically acclaimed, more audiences wouldn’t have access to it. Because white people are hardly giving nonwhite LGBT films any chances, they’re not going to be readily accessible! 

You want to talk about “problematic” content? How about Call Me By Your Name, which featured a relationship between an underage white bisexual teenage boy and a grown-ass white bisexual man? Even Carol, which is the lesbian piece de resistance as told by white lesbians, features a large age gap. Yes, both characters are adults, but age gaps are still fraught with power imbalances and are still a problem within the LGBT community. Meanwhile, Moonlight does showcase sexual content and drug use, but none of the nitty gritty stuff is romanticized as it is in CMBYN or Carol. And again, the sexual content in Carol didn’t stop a bunch of teens and young adults from watching it through any means they could, lol. You all are out here consuming extremely explicit gay fanfiction but balk at an artfully done handjob scene in a poignant movie. Talk about clutching your pearls. But wait, white LGBT people can’t enact racialized homophobia against gays of color :( 

Furthermore, it’s so incredibly racist that people expect white LGBT films to be “easily accessible for everyone” but think that all nonwhite LGBT films are “hard to digest” and “not universal”. Listen, globally speaking, there are MORE LGBT people of color than white LGBT people. There is NOTHING accessible to me about some young white lesbian getting it on with an older white lesbian. There is nothing relatable to me about a white bi teenage boy and a grown white bi man falling in love over a picturesque European vacation. There is nothing relatable to me about a gay white teenage boy being accepted immediately by his parents and having a cheesy happy ending. I don’t get to have those kinds of stories, and most LGBT people of color don’t have those types of narratives in their lives either. 

You know what is relatable to LGBT people of color? What is “accessible” content? Rafiki, a story about two Kenyan lesbians, is relatable to any lesbian of color growing up in a post-colonial country that has criminalized homosexuality. Moonlight, a story about Black gay and bi men, relatable to any Black gay or bi man who has grown up in poverty, who has seen violence, who has experienced homophobia as a backdrop to every other form of material violence in his life. I could go on and on. 

If you all expect us to relate to dominant white narratives and claim that those narratives are universal, it really shouldn’t be difficult to relate to our narratives either. But this just shows the extent of white sociopathy, which penetrates the white LGBT community as well! That you cannot empathize with OUR narratives, despite us being able to empathize with yours. 

And what about “diversity of genres”? “Ethnic gays” isn’t a genre. All of us have different films and different narratives. Rafiki is a coming-of-age movie about Kenyan teenage lesbians. Moonlight is a coming-of-age narrative about a Black gay man. The Handmaiden is a period piece and a thriller starring two East Asian lesbians. Pariah is a coming-of-age movie about a Black lesbian. Tangerine is about a Black trans woman. Saturday Church is a fantasy, musical, and drama film about voguing/drag/ballroom in the Black LGBT community. And you guys want “happy representation, because ‘LGBT people’ (we all know you all mean white gays, lmao) deserve it’”? Okay, how about Saving Face, a romcom featuring two East Asian lesbians? Or Signature Move, a comedy-drama movie featuring a Pakistani Muslim lesbian and a Mexican Jewsih lesbian? The Handmaiden and Moonlight both have happy endings, and so does Saturday Church. 

LGBT people of color are also writing these narratives on their own. Dee Rees, a Black lesbian, directed Pariah. Moonlight was written by gay Black men. Alia Shawkat, a biracial bisexual Arab woman, co-wrote Duck Butter, a wlw comedy. 

All of these films feature people of color of different genders, races, nationalities, ethnicites, and religions, spanning different languages and geographic/cultural context. They are in fact far more diverse than white LGBT films. If you only see them as sad, tragic, or tinged with violence, it’s because you view people of color as sad, tragic, barbaric, or savage, not worth anything more than their pain, deaths, or alleged aggression. 

I’ve even seen some freaks have the audacity to claim that “gay culture is only watching foreign films for representation”. So y’all are willing to see nonwhite and nonwestern LGBT films out of “desperation” but then throw them by the wayside when Oscar-bait, commercialized white LGBT films come out, lol. That’s just so hilarious to me. 

So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:

Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?

This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.

Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?

This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:

This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.

How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.

Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.

Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.

But we’re not done yet.

The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?

Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.

The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.

And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.

If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.

But we’re not done yet.

Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.

This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.

In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.

So it’s been just a little bit over a year since I’ve made this post, and holy shit I didn’t expect it to get so many notes… anyway thought I’d make an update. First, a few responses to common criticisms I noticed:

“That house costs more than you said it costs”

I provided sources for everything, I can’t click on the links for you broski.

“The map of Russia is incorrect”

Strange, my bad… didn’t notice until after I posted that the map I used includes Belarus and a few other countries as part of Russia, no idea why they did that, I should have picked a better map.

“Net worth somehow doesn’t count as worth because not all of it is literal stacks of cash”

First of all I distinctly specified that my figures were based on if said billionaires liquidated their assets, but more importantly that’s like sitting on top of a pile of solid gold bars and claiming you’re totally broke because you can’t use them at the supermarket. Seriously, this is just asinine.

*Insert impassioned defense of capitalism here*

Now if you follow my blog it’s pretty obvious that I’m a leftist, but something I did very deliberately for my billionaire essay was try to avoid ever mentioning left politics or making any moral judgements, i.e. more or less everything I wrote in that post was just objective, inarguable facts. I very intentionally ended the essay with “make of that what you will,” without ever actually commenting on whether the situation was good or bad. If you consider yourself a capitalist and want to remain consistent with reality, you really shouldn’t be offended by this post. If your first response upon looking at a neutral series of data points is to immediately rush to defend the system that produced it, it means you instinctually realize something is terribly wrong and you’re trying to justify it. Just saying, not a good position to be arguing from.

ANYWAY

As of the time of this update, Bill Gates is no longer the richest person in the world; the title now belongs to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with with a mind-blowing $147.7 billion. Now, what could he actually do with all of that? Let’s make a list!

End Homelessness in America

There are an estimated 553,742 homeless people in America. Jeff Bezos could hand every single one of them $50,000 cash for $27,687,100,000, which should be more than enough to get a roof over your head for a decent amount of time.

Give 100,000 students a full ride to Harvard

Going to Harvard University will cost a student about 60,659 a year including tuition, room and board, and various other fees. Paying for a full 4 years for 100,000 students would cost $24,263,600,000.

Buy Iceland for a year

The gross domestic product of Iceland is currently about $23.9 billion dollars, which means for that amount Jeff Bezos could buy every single product and service produced in the country for an entire year.

Fund every US national park for 10 years

This year’s budget for the national park service will probably be about $2.7 billion, so 10 years of funding would be $27 billion.

Give every Amazon worker a $20,000 bonus

Jeff Bezos has 563,100 employees working for Amazon. He could give each and every one of them a $20,000 bonus for $ 11,262,000,000.

End world hunger

It would probably cost around $30 billion to ensure that no person in the entire world suffered starvation and malnourishment this year.

And how much does Jeff have left?

After doing all of that, Bezos would still have upwards of $3.5 billion left over, which is not only far, far more money than a single person could ever spend on themselves, it also would mean he still gets to remain substantially richer than most other billionaires.