Two men holding cash

Tax Day is April 18 this year, and those of you getting tax refunds should get a nice bump to your checking account shortly thereafter. Thoughts & prayers for those in the red!

So, how should you spend your gay money? Twitter users have ideas for putting your hard-earned dollars to werk, as you’ll see below. And they also have thoughts about who and what is undeserving of your gay dollars.

Speaking of, activists took the idea of “gay dollars” literally in the 1980s and 1990s by stamping dollar bills with the words “Gay Money.”

“The purpose is to show the amount of money that gay consumers spend,” one such stamper told The Baltimore Sun in 1993.

Frank Kellas and Marge Summit—owners of the now-defunct Chicago gay bars Gold Coast and His and Hers, respectively—organized a similar money-stamping campaign in 1986. In just over three months, participants stamped “Gay $” on nearly $5 million in bills, as Summit told UPI. A U.S. attorney sent the duo a cease-and-desist letter—citing laws against defacing currency—but Kellas and Summit told UPI they wouldn’t stop.

Now, of course, corporations seem duly convinced of our economic power, as seen in all the rainbow-colored products and pride-signaling we see every June.

As you’ll see here, those marketing ploys pay off sometimes but not all the time…

https://twitter.com/evsybaby/status/1370055916616351751

https://twitter.com/yaadayaada/status/1496487034483089415

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