Go Ask Alex: Should I leave the gayborhood for a bigger paycheck in Alabama?

Got a question that would scandalize your group chat? That’s what this column is for. Go Ask Alex is an anonymous space for queer readers to ask the questions they’re afraid to ask anyone else — about sex, love, life, and everything in between. It’s judgment-free and completely anonymous.

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Hi Alex,

I loved your first book, and I’m curious about your perspective regarding some life decisions I’m facing.

I’m a gay man in my late 20s living in Atlanta. I recently left a very unhappy work environment after paying off over $25,000 in credit card debt. My lease is up soon. I can theoretically go anywhere in the world and do anything I want to do. I work in marketing to pay the bills, but it’s not my passion. However, I have no doubt that most things I’d be fulfilled by aren’t lucrative in the long term.

This is my dilemma: I applied to a job in Alabama that pays much more to do the same work I was doing at my last company. If I get the job and move to Alabama, I would sacrifice the level of safety and peace of mind Atlanta offers queer and marginalized people. I have very few friends here, but they mean the world to me. It’s hard to think about life in suburban Alabama by myself, and I admit this is hypothetical, since a job offer hasn’t been extended to me yet.

How do I decide what’s more important in my life: personal finances or community? Should I do work that’s sustainable enough and pays well to set me up for my future? Or should I stay here, where I at least have some friends and a better chance of finding more? Or should I just find something more professionally satisfying?

Sincerely,
M. B.

Hey M.B.,

It’s lofty to tell you to choose friends over finances while people everywhere are struggling financially, and many don’t have the luxury of that choice, but I have to. I’ll explain why.

First, thanks for reading my book. As you know from reading it, I also lived in Atlanta years ago and remember it as a good chapter, with good friends. There is a thriving gay scene there; indeed, it’s where the indie literary press that published my first book (and will publish my second) is based. Don’t sleep on Atlanta! It’s queering the Deep South and changing it for the better.

But, is it home? What is home? For us, single gay men restricted only by where we can find work, without children, families, or (for most of us) strong ties to where we grew up, the question of where to live becomes, for many, a big, painful decision we wrestle with for years.

It’s an important question and perhaps the most important question for us, because unlike straight people, home for us has certain requirements that aren’t so easy to search for online, categorize, or even name. For one, it has to be a place that’s friendly to gay and queer people, or at least lets us live out our lives as we wish without fear of persecution or violence. Many, many gay and queer people all over the world are robbed of this most foundational requirement of a safe, happy home, and most of us who grow up in conservative or homophobic homes know how toxic and ruinous such places are, so we never forget how much this matters.

Second, you need friends and lovers. We need community in a way that straight people don’t, because our people make up a tiny fraction of the population. Loneliness hits us harder than it does for straights. We have to grapple with isolation in ways they cannot imagine. The ability to connect with fellow queer people is a core survival need.

Third, you need to be able to meet your basic life needs there, which means you must pay your way, eat, have shelter, and have a life. Beyond that, there isn’t much else: After that, you’re nitpicking. So few queer people get a place with all three that the ability to have options, to choose between places with varying degrees of all three, is a luxury, a privilege.

My feeling is that one should choose based on these needs, prioritized in the order listed above: 1. Gay-friendly; 2. Has a visible, local gay and queer community; and, 3. Meets all basic life needs.

Based on that ranking system, I say: Stay in Atlanta. Choose community. Always.

If you were a straight guy with a wife and two kids, my advice would be different: Take the job! Get the pay bump! If you were straight, the world would be filled (indeed, overcrowded) with your people. It would forever reflect you, mirror your life, and affirm you in every fucking ad on YouTube and Netflix (for furniture, for cough medicine, whatever). I can’t watch anything without being forced to see a short trailer selling me something and assuming I, the buyer, identify with a young, straight family with two little brats. Fuck off!

But because you’re gay, you don’t have the luxury of being reinforced by the whole world. You have to dig for community, seek it out, and get a feel for neighborhoods that can only come from spending time in them in-person. You have to listen for when straight women talk about the “up-and-coming” neighborhoods, the “artist” areas, the “trendy” cafés. We learn to read these tags like a silent language: Maybe that’s where the others are. Maybe that’s where I belong. Wherever there are straight women aching to be part of a punished minority and driving up rental costs, there were queers first, making the place exciting and colorful. Everyone wants to be like us, but without our AIDS history and parental rejection. In any city, follow the breadcrumbs of cool, and you’ll find our family.

This isn’t to say that personal finances don’t matter. They do. But go back to that ranking system above: Finances, life admin, all that stuff falls in third place. “Others” is second place. For us, community matters more.

Now to the last question in your message, tucked away like an aside: “Or should I just find something more professionally satisfying?”

Baby, everyone should find something more professionally satisfying if they can. I’d tell anyone to take the leap and make art, even if it risks financial uncertainty and failure, because that’s what life is about. Work occupies the majority of our time, so it should, if possible, be something that makes us happy. If it does not, it’s imperative to try something else.

Thankfully, you’re a gay man. Your queer kin are masters at trying wild new ideas and figuring them out, moving somewhere with no plan, taking the leap, and being a little reckless in pursuit of a better life later on. We’re good at that. Take inspiration from every queer teenager who ever left home for the nearest city with a few hundred dollars. Even here in Berlin, I still meet them all the time: asylum-seekers, dream-chasers, working in bars or as bike couriers until the queer party collective they started begins to hit. That’s the big gay dream, and it’s still alive, still real. These kids (most of them, now, much younger than me) are my greatest source of inspiration, and they can be for you, too. These kids are everywhere. They are your sisters and brothers. Be galvanized and empowered by them. Join them.

Hey there! I’m Alexander Cheves. I’m a sex writer and former sex worker—I worked in the business for over 12 years. You can read my sex-and-culture column Last Call in Out and my book My Love Is a Beast: Confessions, from Unbound Edition Press. But be warned: Kirkus Reviews says the book is "not for squeamish readers.”

Here, I’m offering sex and relationship advice to Out’s readers. Send your question to askbeastly@gmail.com