I am currently an options trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I’ve been trading for about two years but was a clerk and a runner for a few years before that. So I’ve been surrounded by traders for the last five years of my life. They are, to say the least, a different breed. You have your loud mouths, your math wizards, your alpha males, your ivy leaguers and many a filthy alcoholic blowing daddy’s money. You really get all walks of life down there, from the mind-blowingly brilliant to the scummiest sleaze bags you’ve ever witnessed. (On the sleazy side, one loathsome creep comes immediately to mind. This was a guy in his mid-forties who had a wife and young kids at home, and spent no less than four nights a week out ’til all hours of the morning doing filthy things with filthy people. I’d see him everyday literally look like death. A 43 year old man hung over at 8:30 in the morning is a really rough site. But I’d always over hear this guy talking about how his ‘pain-in-the-ass’ wife was pissed off at him. And he’d always say the same thing when someone asked him why the old lady was upset with him yet again. “She’s on the fucking rag,” he’d often reply. Oh, O.K. That’s the problem? It’s not that the father of her two young daughters comes home most weekdays at four in the morning with coke in his mustache, covered in stripper glitter? No. You’re right. It is most likely premenstrual syndrome.)
And while you get every personality and every background represented down on the trading floors, almost every trader I’ve met has one very specific trait in common. That being their weakness for a good gay joke. Almost all the traders I have worked with believe the funniest line a man can utter is to simply imply that another man (preferably a man within ear’s shot) is a homosexual. Not a statement nor a story goes by during the day without another trader flipping the words to make the original speaker sound like a flaming gay man.
A fella comes in on a Monday and tells a story about a date he had over the weekend, invariably a broker will shout out, “What was his name?” to a chorus of howls. You walk out of a closed door meeting with the boss and one of the lads in the office will certainly inform you that you have stains on your knees or that you need to zip up your fly. And god forbid someone mentions that they have to ‘work at the bar this weekend’ with out mentioning the name of the bar. It will loudly be assumed by more than one person that the bar you work at is clearly the Man Hole. (The Man Hole was a ’90s gay hotspot in Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood. It was sold and renamed Hydrate at least six years ago but that doesn’t stop traders from using it as the ultimate punch line every single day.) Gay one-liners occur almost as often as trades. If you were to simply tally the words most often used at the Board of Trade for any given week, the top three would most likely be:
1) Man Hole
2) Buy
3) Sell
But things got serious about six months ago. The financial markets have survived some pretty catastrophic events. They held on through 9/11. They have survived during depressions and have bounced back from devastating crashes. But six months ago, these giant financial institutions were almost crippled. That’s when Brokeback Mountain was released. Oh. My. God. Guys couldn’t work. They didn’t want to. They were too busy trying to one up one and other with gay cowboy jokes. That lasted for four months. Any time a casual Friday was announced, one trader would kindly remind another that he’s finally got a chance to wear ‘those chaps and stir-ups he just picked up.’ Anytime a picture from the movie was found in the newspaper or a magazine (or a picture of a man in any type of western attire for that matter), it was immediately clipped and taped up in the pit with the addition of a trader’s badge letters. (Mine are PHB.) More than once I had the above picture awaiting my arrival in the morning. If someone took a half day, he obviously was going to catch a matinee at the nearest Loews. By now you can guess pretty accurately as to what movie everyone thought he might be seeing.
If Al-Qaida wants to destroy our financial industry, they don’t need to fly planes into buildings or fire-bomb our business districts. They need to produce a movie about a couple of gay traders. You will witness once prosperous brokers answering how their day was with, “I lost Merrill Lynch $400 million. Lost CitiBank almost $600 million and I think I bankrupted ABN Amro. But I’m sorry. When I told Billy that I saw his new trading coat waiting for him in membership. And told him that that was the first time I saw a trading coat in periwinkle. That shit was classic.”
