For the past eight years, Mackenzie Claude, a handsome, broad-framed former Navy medic, has made a good living as a Las Vegas performer. He has played Bally’s, Mandalay Bay—and every one of Vegas’ gay nightlife destinations. Claude, 33, is a drag queen who, after applying an artful amount of contour and highlight and a long blonde wig that falls to his mid-chest, takes the stage as Nebraska Thunderf—ck. “The bigger the hair, the more it hides my man shoulders,” he explains. “I kind of go for a 90s’ Playmate-type feel. A Pamela Anderson. A Bond girl.”
For Ms. Thundf—ck, who fully spells out her name in her own branding, the good times have reached an end. At least for now. Fourteen casinos on the Strip will close starting today, a signal to the rest of the city to shutter and shelter from the coronavirus epidemic. “I’ve never seen it before,” says Claude. “It’s kind of unprecedented.” And it’s quite bad for Claude, who finds himself out of work amid the city’s shutdown. To try to raise some funds, he did what an increasing number of people whose livelihoods have been imperiled by the outbreak have done: He asked his 13,300 Twitter followers for money, posting his handles for Venmo and CashApp, a mobile payments service owned by Square. He sent the tweet last night, and while he won’t comment on how successful it’s been in scraping together funds, the economics at stake are evident. A good Vegas queen earns hundreds of dollars a night, and the most talented pull in thousands, leaving Claude worrying about making rent on his southwest Vegas home. “We’re in a precarious situation. Opportunities aren’t available anymore,” he says. “Everything is being put on pause.”
Charity, like the kind to which Claude has pinned his hopes, is a concept as old as the Bible, and there have been digital tools for it during much of recent history. Who hasn’t seen a GoFundMe campaign posted on Facebook for a sick friend—or some starving artist shill a Patreon account? What makes the current Twitter environment unique is its sudden appearance and intensity, turning from indistinct chatter last week to a full roar in the past few days with hundreds of tweets daily from people whose lives have been upended by the crashing economy and a deadly illness. (Don’t believe it? Search “venmo” or “cashapp” or “paypal”—or just “help”— on Twitter and see what you find.) It’s an uncharted approach to panhandling in the sense that social media was not yet widely used when the world economy last came to a halt, in 2008. Twitter then was two years old, and Venmo didn’t even exist.
“Many people have very limited reserves,” says Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. “This crisis is going to shine a light on how financially fragile a large swath of the population is.”
Put unkindly, as some inevitably will, the people writing these messages are digital beggars. And just as inevitable are the scoffs about their use of expensive devices like a smartphone or a computer to ask for a handout.
But put in more gracious terms, as befits the situation currently confronting the world, these are people without financial security blankets around them. They’re part of the nearly 30% of Americans who told Bankrate.com as recently as last June that they had no emergency savings and the 82% of Americans who said they didn’t have enough stashed away to make it six months without a job. (The Federal Reserve has been warning for years that almost half of Americans couldn’t withstand as much as a $400 emergency.) These are often people at the margins of our economic system: students, the underemployed, hourly workers and ones such as Claude, who work in industries particularly susceptible to sudden evaporations in disposable income and consumer demand. And unlike the many millions of Americans reasonably staring into the future and worrying about their retirement accounts, they have much more immediate concerns. This month’s rent, next week’s groceries—medical bills due long ago.
“Many people have very limited reserves,” says Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. “This crisis is going to shine a light on how financially fragile a large swath of the population is.”
Raquel Arteaga, 31, finds herself in a financially fragile position despite living a few miles from what is paradise for many: the sandy shores and cool breezes of Orange County, California. For several years, Arteaga, who dropped out of San Jose State University after struggling to find a place for herself there, has made ends meet as a piano teacher while living with her parents. She is a self-taught pianist but skilled enough to have collected—until recently—10 paying students, mostly children from ages 8 to 17. She starts them with Romantic era pieces, familiar tunes that they enjoy studying because they’re so well known, and the kids have heard them before.
She bid farewell to her last pupil last week. No one right now is springing for virtual piano lessons. “I let the parents know that I’d continue lessons online. But none of them has gotten back to me,” Arteaga says. “So that's gotten me a little worried about my income since this is basically my only source.” On Sunday night, she took to Twitter, describing her situation and including her Venmo and Paypal details.
“It’s a platform I'm familiar with,” Arteaga says. “I have a decent number of followers,” some 533. “I felt like I'd have a little bit more success on Twitter since I have a greater variety of followers, and they can also reach out to people.”
She guesses she needs to find $300 in the next couple of weeks, “to just, like, squeak by because I'm semi-dependent financially on my parents, so they can kind of help me out,” she says. “But I can't lean on them too much, especially since my dad is self-employed”—he owns a maintenance company—“and is also being affected by the situation.” As of yesterday afternoon, she had collected $55.
Katie Thompson, 35, of Ballwin, Missouri, faces nearly $1,000 in an unpaid emergency room bill, the result of a battery of tests she went through to rule out coronavirus after returning from a vacation in Japan that a friend, eager to celebrate a 35th birthday, treated her to. Thompson was one of the first to venture onto Twitter and raise her hand, tweeting out a link to a GoFundMe account last Tuesday. “I didn’t really have much savings of my own,” admits Thompson, who works for Panera as an hourly contractor, Q-A testing its online catering software. She’s been a little more fortunate in her efforts, raising $250 so far. “I think the people that are going to be hit the worst are…people who are the ones that are living paycheck to paycheck anyway and probably don't have savings to get them over an extended period without work.”
That’s pretty much the situation for Sahara Sidi, 20, a sophomore at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, an elite and moneyed institution that has produced 11 governors, two attorneys general and 13 Pulitzer Prize winners. Sidi, the daughter of a Mauritanian immigrant, belongs proudly to the school’s school First Generation Lower Income community, or FGLI. This population has been hit hard by the school’s decision to send students home for the time being, taking away Sidi’s major income source: work-study jobs, some of which include manning the concessions stand at the campus’ athletic building and folding uniforms and laundry for the athletes.
“I woke up [yesterday] morning and I decided, you know, f—ck my pride, like I need help,” she says, describing her reason for her plaintive tweet, which has produced $300 in donations. She is also helping promote a broader fundraising campaign for all FGLI students at Wesleyan. “I saw Twitter [as] a means of going viral, unfortunately. The reality is, we are isolated. I can’t exactly frolic around campus with a bucket asking people for money.” Remember, all of America has been told to stay indoors. “And so I’m just taking advantage of the fact that everyone is glued to their phones during this pandemic.”
Like Ms. Thunderf—ck in Vegas, Dustin Alexander, 35, of Tacoma, Washington, is a veteran. He served in the Army. And like his fellow former serviceman, Alexander has also relied on a gig-type occupation as a chef for a catering company. He had been pulling 30-hour weekends lately earning $25 an hour—the holidays are busy, as is summer wedding season—and staying home with his 18-month-old son during the week. He and his wife, Jenny, had been saving up to buy a home, hoping to move their family, two mutts and a cat out of their increasingly cramped two-bedroom apartment. Jenny had what seemed like a secure position as an accountant, but she is now down to just two days a week, and Dustin isn’t working at all. Washington is, of course, one of the centers of the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S., and as a result, there’s zero demand for catered parties.
He originally joined Twitter in December to more closely follow Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign, and he is a passionate believer in Yang’s proposal for a Universal Basic Income, a concept similar to an idea that Sen. Mitt Romney seems to be floating in Congress as a possible economic relief mechanism. “I'm reaching out everywhere I can to try to get assistance,” Dustin says late Monday afternoon. “I mean, if they do a UBI stimulus, possibly [the current economic situation] might not affect us that bad, but my landlord is saying that he was going to evict us after the first if we didn't have money.”
Has the tweet worked? “No,” he writes in a late-night text message. “Totally fine though. I wasn’t expecting anyone to donate. Just a long shot.”
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