Everyone knows, and a few clever souls have already managed to
exploit commercially the fact that
gay men will buy almost
any old crap as long as it is marketed to them as being in some way "
camp" or "
ironic". This constitutes a
de facto "gay tax", levied by the private sector, and used in the production of valueless, joyless, soulless
plastic crap.
This makes no sense. In the United Kingdom, we have something called the "National Health Service", which cures us when we are ill and gives us a free dental check up when we reach the age of retirement. In the United Kingdom we also have something called the "tedious fucking NHS government spending bore", which is a kind of person who, whenever the government spends money on providing mindless entertainment for we poor proles, pipes up with a self-righteous whine of "That Money Could Have Been Spent On The NHS!!!!". Preferably illustrated with a picture of a poor little kiddy/granny, who has had to wait for their nasal polyp operation for a few weeks longer because the government dared to hand some of the public's money back to the public.
This kind of argument is, of course, indefensible. But nevertheless, it sticks in the craw a bit to see roads go unrepaired and dead dogs rot in the streets while the gays of this country waste their money on Hello Kitty oven gloves. Tax it and use the money for AIDS research; even the gays would be in support of that, probably.
This would also be a progressive tax in that statistics show that gay men are typically better off than the national average. Lesbians, on the other hand, typically earn less than the national average. So by this logic, they ought to be subsidised. Can we build a "Rainbow Coalition" behind the idea of subsidised lesbianism? I like to think so.
Radical ideas never have it easy. But I think that this proposal will find more support than most.