Fellas, Is It Gay? Venmo
We’re very excited to bring you this funny, honest investigation of Venmo by our friend Melanie Dieg, a maker of pots, maps, and incredible wisdoms. Once, at Ginger’s—where you can often find Mel now that it’s BACK BABY—friends were having a heated discussion, and Mel, whom I’d barely spoken to at this early juncture in our friendship, proclaimed in a monotone, “All drama is courted.” I’ve been chewing on it for years.
-Emily and Alyse
P.S. We had some thoughts about Venmo too. See the end of this piece for our musings and a playlist Mel made for the occasion.
One of my favorite lies to tell is that I don’t have a Venmo. I like the idea of not having a Venmo, but I dislike the idea of owing someone money more, and sometimes you need one to make sure that doesn’t happen (Butch +1).
Usually people just accept my lie, which is funny because my Venmo is just my government name and you could probably find it pretty easily if you tried. My picture is an illustration of the New York Public Library lion, which doesn’t exactly identify it as me, but certainly doesn’t rule out that it could be me, so who knows. I changed it to that because I once got a text saying “Can you change your Venmo picture to something of you not licking someone else’s neck?” Which at the time was a fair request (Drama +1).
I think Venmo is about the furthest thing from anything hot, so instinctively I want to call it straight. I won’t get into a debate if gay or straight people are cheaper, but I will say that sometimes there is this freakish transactional energy in a group of straight people where you can tell that every single thing is being accounted for, and personally, I’d much rather be around gay people creating new and exciting and false definitions of mutual aid than that. Recently I went to a straight dinner party where I texted the host “What should I bring?” and then at the same time as I sent “Don’t say nothing” she actually sent a list of things to bring, which, I’m not sure why, felt really straight to me.
Before we get into it, let’s discuss some things that are hotter than any conversation involving the word Venmo:
“I got it” (hot)
“I already got it” (sneaky)
“Your money’s no good here” (funny)
“Stop” (not in a scary way)
*Pressing a bill into someone’s hand* (maybe in a scary way but also hot)
Even liars are honest sometimes, so I’ll admit that I do think a lot of straight things are hot, and so will also give Venmo its due diligence as a gay and Not Hot entity. When I look at my very existent Venmo—it’s actually the closest thing I have to a little black book aside from my Tupperware collection (Sorry, it really just never feels like the right time to return)—some holes form in my theory.
I find a lot of treats scrolling down this memory lane: two transactions with “Venmo User” which I know are both separate people who have blocked me (+2 Drama), an early flirting style in which I just sent immediately back anything I received (+1 Stupid), and some really nice evidence from what appears to be a fight about money in which $750 was angrily passed back and forth until...you guessed it...she kept it (+3 Dramatic and Stupid).
It’s not terribly surprising that my Venmo scrolling got me thinking about all of my failures of the heart (+2 Yearn). I always have this silly little idea that if I had lived in the 1980s or something, heartbreak like this just wouldn’t exist. It’s silly, but nice, to imagine not having to see that you’ve been reduced to a “Venmo User,” or not having to be absolutely sure you are on private to avoid a fight (+1 Secrecy), or really to just be able to avoid any of the various other phone-based minefields that can hurt your feelings. It’s silly, but it doesn’t help my fantasy to read something from that era about dykes about town in New York, only wanting to do good work, have good sex, and make meaningful friends. It’s silly, but it does really make me feel like I could stop sniffling over my Venmo, be a dyke about town, and just go treat someone to a drink.
To really decide if something is gay or straight I need to ask Sarah, who is the best at being straight and the best at immediately offering unwavering opinions. She declares Venmo as straight and provides our most compelling evidence:
Nothing more straight than feeling someone owes you something (+1)
Nothing more straight than exact change (+1)
Nothing more straight than being linked to a bank (+2)
Venmo would have said no homo in 2010 (+5)
As always, I find her input genius and true, but that doesn’t mean I’ll listen to it. It looks like the numbers are backing me up—Venmo might actually be gay. The desire to account for, or owe, or break even is definitely annoying (straight), but maybe Venmo is just our sad little necessity for sliding slimy pink dollars back and forth.
I know that I’m a lot of annoying things but I hope being cheap is never one of them. I think because I loved being butch before I loved being a dyke, treating people will always be an important part of my fantasy of myself. Venmoing me disrupts that, and reminds me that I can owe people too, because of course we all owe each other a lot (+1 Earnest). I try to care about doing good work but a lot of the time, I really think the only reason to make money is to walk to the bar and do a little hand wave and say “I got it.”
Anyways, I want to end with this because I find it pretty damning:
Alyse: I spend money like I have money, because I’ve never had money and essentially I don’t care much about money. One of my favorite things to do is buy things for beautiful women. I also love to get tipsy at the bar and tell near strangers to “put it on my tab.” Emily is the same way, and this is why we are absolutely monstrous together.
When my friend Preterra wants to justify spending an exorbitant amount of money on something, she holds it out in front of her, squints her eyes and says, “whoa, now this is a lifepiece,” meaning of course that it is invaluable, that it might even be violent to deprive herself of it. It’s now my trick too. It’s amazing how in an instant you can create an entire idea of a life around something you desire.
This isn’t my essay, but I’d argue that Venmo is neither straight nor gay, it’s just a financial app. However, it seems extremely gay to spend time thinking about Venmo, the little payments you need to send, and all the little payments you have sent. Why does this feel gay? Well, it’s Melanie’s job to explain, but I’ll just say this—I’m always thinking about how my love life is archived. Payments back and forth to lovers present & past carries with them entirely too gay a weight. Like most gays, I spend a lot of time feeling nostalgic, feeling weepy at what was or what could have been.
I wrote an essay once called “Splitting the Bill,” about my last relationship and how the final act of our life together involved writing out a ledger of who owed whom what & who would get what in the divorce. If owing something to someone else (potentially for the rest of your life) feels gay (and I’d argue it is gay,) then investing in things knowing full well you’ll probably lose them feels exponentially gayer.
I don’t really know if it’s gay or straight to split a bill. If I had to choose, though, I’d say it’s straight to split the bill. My arguments are probably a little heterophobic, and definitely simplistic, but my definition of queerness requires me to give just a little bit more than I might be comfortable with, to emote embarrassingly (and often publicly,) to pay out my ass in moving fees so I can keep the vintage couch we once watched TV on, to keep the love notes from my high school girlfriend for the rest of my life, to care more about fun than I do about debt, and most importantly to buy things for hot women.
Emily: When I first used Venmo, towards the end of college, I assumed it was a drug dealer app because the only person I knew who used it was the friend who sold me drugs. His business put a sizable chunk of the campus onto Venmo, until the app congratulated him with a special badge for being one of its top users, and, understandably freaked out, he reentered the cash economy. Money is always a beady endeavor, but we usually keep it private, treating bank balances like we would a medical record or a diary. But at some crucial juncture, Venmo’s developers decided to do something different. They made everyone’s transactions public by default. I can log on to Venmo and see within seconds that the fifth cutest guy from my high school has requested money from a stranger with the note “ayooooooo”.
Surely, the Venmo team had endless focus groups about this decision: Why would we make this a feature of our app? What purpose would that possibly serve? Aren’t transactions supposed to be furtive, private, almost sheepish? Isn’t the point of Venmo to obfuscate, not magnify, the the awkwardness of bills changing hands over a dinner table?
Clearly, they doggedly wanted Venmo to have a social dimension, and since then, it has become one of my favorite social media apps. You can switch all your Venmo transactions to be private by default—I certainly have—but few people seem to know you can do this, or maybe they don’t care, so the feed lays bare who’s cheap, who’s responsible for the utilities, who’s dating and breaking up.
In my last relationship, we used Venmo a lot. As a grad student, I didn’t make much money, and she made less, so we’d Venmo each other constantly for small amounts: she’d send me money for the McChicken I bought her on a Wednesday night (pansexual) and the 2x4s I picked up at the Home Depot on Thursday (gay), and then I’d Venmo her back for the internet bill and we’d continue like this, years and the same $25 passing uselessly between us. Neither of us were quite yet built for relationships, their mutual, wobbling debt. As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly. Venmo was the vomit.
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