Skeleton in the Closet Out at Work by Aongus Burke "Unless you're a prostitute or a porn actor what does your sexuality have to do with work?" states Martin, one of dozens of gay men interviewed by James D. Woods for his book The Corporate Closet. "Sex belongs in the bedroom, not in the boardroom," he continues. Martin's words would probably win him the favor of your average heterosexual. While polls generally show that a solid majority of Americans (and thus presumably most straight Americans) believe gays and lesbians should not be discriminated against in most kinds of workplaces, most of them also don't see why it should ever come up as an issue. "I don't go around broadcasting my heterosexuality" is a familiar variation on the common sentiment of many heterosexuals as they decry anything from a gay pride parade to an ACT UP demonstration. We don't ask, why must you tell? But even if one accepts the need or desire for queers to be public about their sexuality in certain spaces, not many straights would consider the workplace to be one of them. The office isn't supposed to be a political warzone and it certainly isn't supposed to be a sexual playground. So why would a gay person ever need to come out of the closet while at work? Many, perhaps most gay and lesbian people who work for corporations-probably not the most radical bunch of queers to begin with-seem eager to internalize this logic, just do their jobs, and deal with the gay stuff at home after a pleasantly apolitical day at the office. Enter me. Being gay is not a small part of who I am. It has everything to do with the person I have become over the past few years and I mostly like that person. Homosexuality has both sexual and political components. I spend a lot of time thinking about and acting on both. I'll spare you the details on what that means for the sexual dimension. Politically, however, I can say that I have found, and continue to find, gay activism to be one of the few things in life I find genuinely fulfilling and worthy of my passion. And I believe that the most basic form of gay activism is to be open about who you are. But I have also found over and over again that being open about being gay is a much more complicated matter than it seems on the surface. It can mean not lying if someone asks you whether you're gay (a point-blank question almost no one ever asks) or it can mean making your life a complete open book (a level of openness almost no gay person wants). As far as occupational matters go, the first time this came up was when I was creating my resume. Though I thought about it for a bit, this one turned out to be a no brainer: there was really no way I could not list Queer Alliance in my section on extracurricular activities at Wesleyan. It was the organization that I had done by far the most-and the most important-work with while I was at Wes; if I had left it off, no potential employer would think I had done much of anything besides study in college. Besides, I reasoned, would I really want to work at place where they'd have a problem with someone who was openly gay? By February of last year, I was beginning to wonder. In spite of my hotshot CSS major, my honors candidacy and what I know was a damn good GPA, I had gotten very few callbacks for first round interviews and none for second rounds. The interviews themselves were proving to be another arena in which sexuality and its disclosure were carefully negotiated. Every interviewer I encountered last year would obviously have read my resume, but very few asked me any questions about Queer Alliance. Some didn't ask questions about extracurriculars at all, but most of my interviewers made a very telling move. Even though it came after the Queer Alliance blurb, and even though it occupied only about a third of the latter's space on my resume, most of my potential employers questioned me about the second campus organization I listed, a little old campus publication called Hermes. Of course, all of them did ask me about what kind of things I wrote about for this magazine. And even if I wasn't entirely forthright there (and I did become a bit more evasive as it got later in the year and the prospect of being unemployed and living with my parents-more gay-related issues there-for a long period after graduation became a more and more likely possibility), I was going to have to tell them what I was writing my thesis on-gay men, AIDS, and promiscuity. So, ultimately, sexuality became the unavoidable issue in every interview I participated in. And anyone who was considering hiring me must have thought that I would make it an issue in the workplace. I sent resumes and cover-letters to about 50 companies (all of whom were actively recruiting) last year. About ten of them called me back for a first round interview. Three gave me a callback for a second round interview. I got exactly one job offer. Was I the victim of discrimination? I honestly don't know. I thought I had pretty decent credentials for employment, but it's also true that I hadn't done much rigorous coursework in the more quantitative strands of the economics. I also didn't have real experience working in an office environment at that point. It's possible that this hurt me when I applied for investment banking and consulting positions early in the year (though everyone told me that not having an extensive background in these fields wouldn't be a huge disadvantage). During second semester I spent a little more time making my resume look pretty and I began to apply mostly for paralegal positions. I fared quite a bit better. Still, I was surprised that only one firm made me an offer and I have my suspicions as to why. But another gay male who graduated from Wesleyan last year, one who applied to most of the same law firms I did, tells me that he doesn't think that being open about his sexuality and his activism on his resume and in interviews hurt him at all. Still another tells me that he thinks that the "Queer" in Queer Alliance may have cost him a job or two; since those employers who did bring up QA in my interviews invariably asked about the name uncomfortably, I suspect he's right. But who knows? One theory I consider is that a few employers did discriminate against me because of my sexuality, but only because it was such an overwhelming presence on my resume and in my interviews. Even if several of my classmates were discussing their activist accomplishments in their interviews, none of them probably brought up topics as charged as AIDS and promiscuity the way I did. In my case, it was necessary. But I didn't know how necessary it was going to be for me to continue making my sexuality an issue once I actually landed in the workplace. If someone said something homophobic in the office, I definitely intended to speak up. But even more than that, I wanted to continue being an activist in the workplace and being out would be a necessary part of that. Studies show that people who know someone who is gay are less likely to support homophobic policies and politicians. And maybe a few of the people I was going to work with would even start asking me questions about things gay. They might learn something from me (and I from them). But when would it be appropriate to out myself? I didn't think I could take any cues from the heteros in my office on the matter. Every moment, it seems, is an appropriate moment to tell the world that you're straight. Don't think so? Consider the following. The very first day at my job, the other paralegals in my practice group took Steve-one of the other new paralegals-and I out to lunch. Within five minutes I found out that Steve was married. By the end of the first week, I knew which of the other paralegals did and didn't have a significant other of the opposite sex. It wasn't much longer before I knew the same for most of the attorneys in my practice group. And, to top it all off, employees of the firm who are married get their spouse's name listed next to theirs in the firm directory. Disclosure of your sexuality when you're straight comes in forms as innocuous as telling your officemates what you did with your girlfriend last weekend or what schools your kids are going to. Coming out as gay is somehow always a bit more dramatic than that. I suppose I could be just as casual about revealing my sexuality as your average straight person, but I know that it's not a casual revelation. Some people will invariably be made uneasy by it and it almost seems insensitive (and thus counterproductive) to assume otherwise. It becomes easy to feel like you have some sort of obligation to prepare people for the discomfort you might be introducing into their lives by telling them that you're gay. But the flip side of the coin is that if you have to prepare people for this revelation, it's as if you're trying to make a spectacle of yourself. If telling people that you're gay can't just flow naturally from the conversation, then outing yourself will likely seem like an attempt to draw attention to yourself and ultimately to some hidden political agenda. How many gays have tortured themselves to tell someone that they're gay only to have their confidant respond with something along the lines of "That's fine, but why'd you think that I'd want to know about it?" You're damned if you do, you're silenced if you don't. I tried to strike a balance at work. After a few weeks of encountering situation after situation where I deliberated the appropriateness of coming out-and always hastily decided not to-I finally came out to a coworker-Steve, actually. A female friend of mine had visited me in the office that afternoon during my lunch hour. After she had left, Steve asked whether she was my girlfriend or not. I wasn't about to let this opportunity go. "Oh, no," I said with a hint of exasperation. "Steve, I'm gay." Someone flushed behind us (did I mention we were both at the urinals in the men's room?). "Oh," he said. "I had no idea." We both finished our business, zipped up and quickly got the hell out of there. Whoever was behind us didn't leave that stall untill we were long gone. Awkward though it had been, I determined that this method of coming out to people was a good one. I decided I would try to transpose it to new locations in the office. It was a one-on-one situation, the kind that entitles me to a little more discretion over what direction the conversation gets steered in. On the other hand, the revelation was still casual enough that I couldn't easily be accused of having a hidden agenda. I'd just wait for everyone else to ask me if I had a girlfriend and before I knew it I'd be the office homo. But for that plan to work, I'd need some cooperation from the office heteros. They'd have to assume I was one of them and ask the all important question. But as it turned out, besides Steve and one of the other newer paralegals, no one was interrogating me on that dimension of my life. I didn't get it. How had it happened that I knew all about their personal lives without even trying, while no one seemed to give a damn about me? How rude! I couldn't figure it out until one day one of the more experienced paralegals asked me a question about my previous work experience. "Are you the one who taught with the Princeton Review?" Justine asked. "No," I replied a bit bewilderdly. "Oh," she said. "One of the new paralegals had it on their resume." "You saw all of our resumes?" I asked. Then I remembered that Justine, along with two other paralegals, had actually interviewed me for this job. Of course she would have seen my resume. That means that she saw that Queer Alliance section. My sexuality had probably been well known among the paralegals in my practice area all along. And if that was the case, it shed a whole new light on why people weren't asking me any questions about my personal life. Maybe they didn't want to know. It's not that I ever really thought that the people I work with would be particularly disgusted by my personal life. But if it's an uncomfortable topic for me to bring up, imagine how uncomfortable it would be for them. At this point I realized that if I was going to really be out to them, I couldn't just wait for them to give me an opening. So I became a little bolder. When Steve started talking one day about his Ph.D thesis to a bunch of us, I started talking about my undergraduate one (I think most people figured out that if I researched and wrote about the sex lives of gay men, I was probably one of them). When people started talking about their relationships in my presence, I no longer spoke about them in the abstract and started talking about my own experiences. I think all of my fellow paralegals know at this point and I like that. The women love to have me around when they talk about relationships and sex. And I've even had a few good heart-to-heart talks with several of the paralegals, of both genders, about some of the more serious issues surrounding homosexuality. But at the same time, I also know there's a limit to our camaraderie. I will probably never be really great friends with any of these people. Naive though it seems to me now, I had actually thought that coming out to my co-workers would make me closer to them. I mean, how could I ever be good friends with these people if I kept such an important part of my life hidden from them? But some things don't change. Though I've given them all a peek at my personal life, and though some of them are intrigued enough to occasionally ask for another look, none of them seem to want to be a part of that life or make me part of theirs. Much of the bonding that takes place between my workers, not unlike much of the bonding that took place between my peers in high school, is of a decidedly heterosexual nature. The guys talk with the guys about the girls; the girls talk with the girls about the guys; the girls flirt with the guys; the guys flirt with the girls. There's not a whole lot of room for someone like me to fit in. And I think we all know it. I don't often get asked if I want to hang out with the rest of the group after work, and I usually say no when I am asked. They have their bars to go to, I have mine. I was a little disappointed when none of my co-workers showed up at my apartment-warming party a couple of months ago, but I wasn't really surprised. One of the more interesting things about all of this is how it's affected my productivity in the workplace. Believe it or not, it does have an impact. Unless you're self employed, you usually have to be a team player in order to succeed in the work world. I'm not sure I'm much of a team player. Even though I may be out to all of the paralegals in my practice area, I still haven't talked about that part of my personal life with most of the attorneys that I work with, not to mention any of the clients I deal with on a regular basis. The opportunity does occasionally present itself, but these are relationships that I am less willing to jeopardize by bringing up a possibly uncomfortable topic. When you're being so careful about managing a certain piece of information about your life (never mind hiding it) around certain people, it's not likely that you'll be spending a lot of time learning about them. You try and get down to business with them, cut to the chase and wrap up the conversation as quickly as possible. This may seem efficient, but in some ways it's not. If I developed a closer relationship with the lawyers or clients I work with, I'd probably ultimately learn a lot more. The client might end up telling me things about him, his job and the organization he works for that would help me serve him better. The attorney I report to might be willing to mentor me if she had any reason to give a damn about me. For that matter, if you're not particularly good friends with the people you work with, chances are you're not going want to spend a lot of time around the office. You're not going to want to work closely with the people you need to, or put in the hours of overtime required to do a project well. It's occurred to me at times that my sexuality might in some odd way help make me a better employee. I'm probably never going to be tied down with the kind of family obligations that make it so difficult for others to work many late nights. And the fact that I don't socialize a whole lot with everyone else in the office probably does make me a more efficient worker. But I often get the feeling that whether I'm a better or a worse worker for being gay won't matter a whole lot down the road. There's a good chance I'm screwed either way. Success in the business world isn't unlike success in the academic world. You're never going to get very far if you're not good at your job. But making partner or being promoted into upper management is a lot like getting tenure; it's never based upon purely meritocratic standards. It also depends on your ability to fit into the boys' club upstairs. I think the powers-that-be at Wesleyan call it collegiality The average partner at my firm probably makes three times what a senior level associate does. So, unless s/he brings in a lot of valuable clients or is instrumental to their retention, there isn't often a huge financial incentive to offer a lawyer a partnership. But what if you're a fifth-year attorney who has become pretty chummy with some of the partners? Maybe you go out with them for drinks on occasion or have been to their house for a fourth of July barbecue. Maybe your wife is friends with some of their wives or you were invited to their son's wedding. In cases like this, maybe those partners wouldn't want to see you leave the firm. Hell, it might be awkward at that stage to have to call you into their offices to tell you that you should start looking for a job somewhere else. I doubt that I'll ever put anyone in that kind of uncomfortable situation. It's possible that someday, somewhere I'll be a valuable enough employee to someone on a purely financial sense that everyone will want to make sure that I stay. But ultimately I think it's more likely that, when the time comes, few people are going to be really heartbroken to see me leave. They might think that I did good work or that I was nice guy. A few might even think that I helped them learn something important about gay people. But a few will also probably think to themselves, "He was a faggot anyway."