Debt, Identity, Inheritance and Being Queer

IDQ author Russell Christie has an essay in this quarter’s edition of Lumpen — a journal of poor and working class writing:

‘‘Being working class means both a lack of inheritance in hard copy (property, savings and investments) and a lack of inheritance of knowledge in managing these things. Financial knowledge is not part of working class cultural inheritance because there is no material inheritance that it represents and regulates…

Did my unfamiliarity with the financial world, my ignorance of its reality and my inherited cynicism about it, feed into my blithely becoming involved in credit card fraud in the US in the 1990s..?

We flew to New York, rented a Cadillac and drove up to Boston. A new, white Cadillac with the just introduced, high-torque Northstar engine. An aspirational machine, adding power to luxury. It roared and its front end lifted as you put your foot down. The air was full of leather, the couch of the front seat was cream with tan piping. The dashboard automatically illuminated as dusk fell and we hit the interstate. Driving, I stretched my arm across to Max, a curly headed, brown-eyed, New York Jewish boy who’d picked me up one Sunday afternoon in the End Up bar in San Francisco…”

More in Lumpen, Issue 5.