Working It Out
Room for Squares
How much of being gay in the workplace is your business, and how much of it is your employer’s? The answer to that is a highly a personal decision. But whether by our hands or not, those of us who work in the corporate world will sooner or later become office chatter. In this day and age, most of us are protected from unlawful discrimination by Fair Employment laws. However, even those laws can’t save us from the often guillotine like machinations of office politics.
In social settings, you can almost always choose your friends and companions. It’s simple enough to not hang out with people you don’t like or know you won’t get along with, either because you share different values or hold different views. In a business setting, however, no one, save for the big honcho at the top, is afforded that same luxury of picking and choosing the people he wants to spend his time with. So what happens if you’re not that top dog? You’re stuck making small talk with all sorts of freaks and geeks.
When the average American spends more than a third of his day at work, having to watch yourself becomes a problem for gay men and women who don’t want their personal lives to interfere with their professional personas. It quickly puts an unnecessary strain on work relations because you constantly have to come up with excuses or lies about what you did over the weekend, on vacation, or on Valentine’s Day. Unwittingly, you get backed into a “pronoun corner,” where every incriminating “my boyfriend and I” must be painstakingly replaced by an ambiguously unassuming “we.”
I wish that there were guidelines on how to handle uncomfortable situations like these, but there aren’t. No H.R. handbook comes complete with a section on how to skirt topics pertaining to love, sex and family with coworkers who demand a familiarity with your life on the basis of a 40 hour week relationship. Whether you like it or not, you’re expected to participate in conversations and divulge secrets about yourself that some people might potentially find off putting. And I’m not even talking about the dirty little bedroom secrets we all have.
That bottle of KY Jelly you keep on your nightstand right next to your leather handcuffs and whip might not be anyone’s business, but you can bet almost everything else is. And if you’re in an uncomfortable environment, any sort of prying, however harmless and appropriate it may be, puts you at a disadvantage. It’s hard to establish a connection with someone if you can’t be honest.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that there is no way for you to move up the corporate ladder without first getting in with the boss. And how gay men and women can expect to do that without being able to share anecdotes about little Jack and little Jill and dinner with the Jones’ is a unique challenge. So little of office politics has to do with right and wrong that it’s not unlikely for employers to play favorites. That promotion you were eyeing? Yeah, it just went to Joe Blow with the brown nose over there.
When you’re forced to play in an uneven playing field, the question isn’t how you can go about leveling it. Rather, the question becomes how you can make yourself a better player. So while the work may be strictly white collar, you can still get down and dirty with the game.
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