Are You Guys Brothers?

     As a birthday gift to Ray who never complains but who feels as if my work schedule eliminates much of our quality time together, I’m “going fishing” until the first of September.

     This will be my last blog entry until then. Today, I’ll finish the chapter on “work” that I started last week. As of next week, my book “Are You Guys Brothers?” will be available at www.authorhouse.com.

      Have a wonderful summer of experiences to which you are fully present. Spend time with the people you love.

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     Since coming out as gay in 1974 at the age of 26, I’ve never again had to endure the day-long horrors of the workplace closet. Initially poor as a church mouse on my own, I nevertheless have been free in a way most gay people, including the love of my life, have not been fortunate enough to be. My being gay, rather than being tolerated at work, was a necessary credential for me in writing, speaking, and serving in the Mayor’s Office.

      I suspect that the two-faced chaos of Ray’s personal and professional identity, coupled with his spiritual hunger for honesty in his life, the high powered nature of his job, and his separation from me all contributed significantly to his hitting bottom with booze and his subsequent suicide attempt. During his recovery, and with his return to the Boston office, he came out without qualification and his work life became dramatically more tolerable. As a result, his client base grew in both size and stability.

     After four more years in Boston, still enduring the “deep disappointment” and anger of a New York boss (the same one who said “fag” more often than “good morning,”) because Ray hadn’t come out to him sooner, Ray flew to New York to give notice that he planned to retire in a year. His boss there urged him to stay on and to take over Lehman’s office in Atlanta. Ray said that he would but only if the firm affirmed his homosexuality by treating me as his spouse and paying my relocation expenses too.

     We were in Atlanta for a couple of years. Our home in Ansley Park was the site of the office holiday party. That provided, perhaps for the first time in Wall Street history, the opportunity for the male spouse of the male office manager to guide the wives of the male staff through a tour of the master bedroom and respond to questions, at the same time offering decorating hints that could be incorporated in their own homes.

     My speaking engagements, after having been dominated for many years by those on college campuses, were now primarily taking place in U.S. corporations, particularly for those in the high tech industry such as with Hewlett-Packard, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Motorola, and because of HIV, for drug companies, including Merck and DuPont.

     By the time we moved to New York so that Ray could take over as Managing Director of Global Equity Sales, again at the request of his boss to delay retirement for two more years, Wall Street firms had emerged as my primary clients, starting with JP Morgan/Chase. Meanwhile, for Ray at work, the word “fag” continued to spice the boss’s office conversations and conference calls.

     My message to corporate executives is that to succeed in their goal of attracting and retaining the best and brightest employees, they need to create an environment where every person feels safe and valued. It’s not enough to include “sexual orientation” in their non-discrimination policy, to offer domestic partner benefits, to have a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employee resource group, and to sponsor gay cultural events. The ability of people to feel safe and valued at work results from the “music” of the office, not the “words” of the corporate policy. How, I ask, do gay employees know for certain that they are valued? (Not, certainly, with the daily use of the word “fag.”)

     Ray became my example of how important it is to focus on the individual behavior of colleagues on a day-to-day basis in order to create a safe and productive environment. After years of stellar service as a revered boss and account manager, he walked away at age 45 from a significant salary because he didn’t want to spend another day of his life feeling “tolerated.” While no one at work was personally, openly hostile, Ray got tired of being the only one who wasn’t asked on Monday about his weekend or on Friday about his holiday plans. His peers weren’t conscious of the exclusion, and they meant no harm, but their strategy of avoidance created for their colleague an environment where he felt marginalized. And so, he gave notice, and in doing so, his frequent nightmares ended and he put away forever the armor he had reluctantly pulled on every morning for most of his working life.

     That was a dozen years ago, and since then Ray and Lehman Brothers have changed dramatically. Ray looks younger, healthier, and far happier, and Lehman has become a leader in the financial world in its efforts to not just accommodate diversity but to empower it.

     My professional career has gone from being fired for coming out as gay to now speaking to bankers in London, Hong Kong, Sidney, Singapore, and Tokyo about gay and transgender issues, at the same offices and to some of the same people Ray had managed in his career. A highlight of my work life was when I was invited to give my two hour presentation to the senior managers at Lehman’s corporate headquarters in New York, with Ray in the auditorium.

      Joe Gregory, the firm’s terrific Chief Operations Officer (COO), and a colleague of Ray’s, welcomed me and Ray, and spoke passionately to Ray’s former peers and to those hired later, about Lehman’s commitment to retain the best and brightest employees by creating an environment that values all diversity.

     I’ve had some big challenges with speaking engagements before, like the time I spoke to 2,000 fraternity and sorority members in an outside venue at UCLA, but speaking at Lehman wasn’t a big challenge at all. There was great enthusiasm in the room and great affection for Ray. It was a moment of bliss for us both. I’ve also had some tough audience members to contend with over the years, like the guy who sighed loudly, and dramatically looked at his watch the entire time I spoke because, he said, my message “would bring about the destruction of Western civilization.” But everyone in the room at Lehman smiled and was clearly eager to learn.

     Under the right circumstances, a speaker and an audience can do an incredible dance together, each following the other’s lead, starting slowly but confidently, and building to a graceful series of turns that obliterate any awareness of time or outside distraction. We did such a dance together that day, and periodically, as the senior executives joined me in laughter at a humorous observation of our shared human experience, I would look over at Ray who was beaming and nodding with pride and gratitude.

     At its conclusion, Joe stood to shake my hand, thank me, thank Ray, and thank his colleagues for their enthusiastic participation. “We’ve come a long way in a short time,” he said, “and we have a long way to go.”

     Ray’s old comrades surrounded him, patted his back, and handed him their business cards before we left for our hotel. I was scheduled to give a second talk the next day to a second group of senior traders, but Ray didn’t feel the need to attend. “I got the closure I needed,” he said, wrapping his arm around my shoulder as we walked down the street. “Thank you. You were just great. I was so proud.”

     In the many years that I’ve been working with investment banks worldwide, I’ve come to understand more about the game of Bingo they all play, but what makes a far bigger impression on me is how hard they all are trying now to create a work environment where people like me won’t fear being fired and people like Ray won’t need to retire.

     So, now Al Parker, my Colt model alter ego, is walking up the stairs wearily after a long day of travel, and Don Knotts is home filling every room with gay pride. It suits us both just fine.

     Springtime in Provincetown can be a magical experience. The National Seashore is extraordinarily beautiful with blooming beach plums, Rosa Ragusa, blueberry and cranberry shrubs, sea grass, and scrub oaks and pines. Baltimore orioles, yellow finches, cardinals, and hawks fill branches and the sky.

     I think of all of this as I cool my heels in Columbus, dealing with an hour and a half Boston-based weather delay. It’s likely that I’ll miss my Cape Air connection, which happens regularly in the spring. I will run from terminal A to terminal C and breathlessly ask at the ticket counter if the flight has departed. I will then hope to get a seat on the next flight. That too will be delayed for over an hour. I hate to travel. If I didn’t love my work so much, I wouldn’t do it.

     So, while I’m away, biding time in a hotel or airport, my mind drifts to its comfort zone that is landscaped with lilac, azaleas, roses, green grass and buds on a hundred annual and perennial plants, all placed with great expectations or recalled with fond memories.

     I take comfort too in thoughts of getting into the water, swimming out to the boat if temperatures allow, and opening up the throttle for an escapist, wave-jumping trip to the lighthouse.

     When I have satisfied my hunger with images of home, I go back to the book I have brought with me to further distract me from the debilitating impact of packed and cramped planes, and the company of other equally-frustrated passengers. I have come to enjoy spy novels but am currently savoring the musings of Scott Pomfret in his gay Catholic memoir “Since My Last Confession.” If you are gay and Catholic (or in recovery from the latter) you will enjoy it.

     In a few weeks, frustrated travelers will have my book “Are You Guys Brothers?” to distract them from their plight. What follows is the first half of the next chapter.

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The valentine that I gave to Ray in the first year of our relationship was a spiral notebook filled with pictures cut out of magazines, accompanied by my biased recollections of our courtship.

     The photos representing me, for instance, were of the very sexy Colt model, Al Parker. The photos selected to represent Ray were of the bumbling character portrayed consistently by Don Knotts. The sound of Ray’s wonderful laughter as he paged through my labor of love is still making its way through space, assuring inhabitants of other planets of how happy gay couples on Earth can be.

     When it came to representing my understanding of Ray’s work in the field of finance, I had a picture of an old woman staring intently at her dozen Bingo cards, looking for all of the B-4s to dot with her dobber. Thirty years later, he tells people that this is still how I think of him on the job.

     The truth be told, though I don’t have much interest in matters of money, I do know that his years on Wall Street were a lot less fun for him than playing Bingo. Ray loved his work, as well as the people with whom he worked, clients and colleagues alike, but he hated the loneliness that he felt daily as a sensitive, politically liberal, gay man working in an office setting that was often the socially insensitive turf of boisterous, conservative, straight white “Alpha” men.

     The coming together in our marriage of our very different career paths was fun for others to discuss, fascinating to observe, and very beneficial to me, as his income allowed me the freedom to do anything I wanted as a gay writer and educator without needing to make any money. But my work life made Ray’s work life far more difficult than it would have been had he paired up with a man less on the cutting edge of the gay civil rights movement.

     When we met, Ray had just left a job as a food and beverage cost controller for a hotel to take a “custodial” position at a bank. He laughs now at how he assumed he would be doing janitorial work but didn’t care because he wanted the increase in pay to cover the cost of his night school college education. It turned out not to be sweeping floors but rather being a custodial accountant of mutual funds, a job which launched his lucrative career. Being very personable, a quick learner, and a hard worker, Ray excelled, became a favorite of clients, and was rapidly hired by a series of firms until he ended up at Lehman Brothers in their Boston office.

     His boss at Lehman was a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, bigger-than-life, short Italian with a heart of gold but little awareness of things gay. With him, and with many of Ray’s trading floor colleagues, the word “fag” was a frequently employed synonym for “wimp.”

     Meanwhile, back in our apartment, I was coordinating Dignity’s national social action initiatives, writing my column in the gay press, doing the layout of Detroit’s gay newspaper, speaking on gay issues at colleges across the country, fielding calls day and night from gay people, sober and drunk, who needed to talk, and ultimately coordinating the City of Boston’s response to the AIDS epidemic, and dealing with all other gay constituent needs for the internationally-respected Mayor, Kevin White, who hired me as his full-time liaison to the gay community, the first such position in the country.

     Ray would wearily climb our three flights of stairs at the end of his day and enter the bustling center of gay activism in our living room. One day, he walked in on a meeting of local gay doctors and community organizers as we were writing the state’s first “safe sex” brochure. At another time, we were drafting the Red Cross policy on blood donations. And one day, as he was walking past the line of two hundred people who stood waiting to get into the fundraiser we were hosting for our friend, the embattled Rep. Gerry Studds, one person said “Hey, no cuts,” to which Ray smiled and explained “I live here.” In every instance, Ray would peel off his suit coat, pull loose his tie, give me a kiss, and join in the discussion.

      In some ways, this was a great gift to Ray. Coming home each night to a place where being gay was actively and enthusiastically celebrated nurtured his sense of self-determination and esteem. The phone calls, letters, film crews, reporters, strategy sessions, private consultations, and the dinner party conversations with the nation’s leading gay thinkers that dominated our young lives accelerated his journey to self-love.

     But how do you go from laughing at night with Elaine Noble, Tim McFeeley, Ginny Apuzzo, Sr. Jeannine Gramick, and Steve Endean to a Wall Street office the next morning where your identity is a secret? While Ray’s excitement about his participation in the early days of the movement gave him a vision for his future, it also raised his expectations of life and made it harder to keep his mouth shut outside of the house, as so many of his gay and lesbian peers had learned to do twenty-five years ago.

     And so, he came out, one of the first in the financial world to do so, initially to a handful of colleagues and then to his clients. For a short while, two of the major components of his life, his identity and his work, came together in a wholesome, happy way. Not only did it not matter to his clients, but they found his honesty refreshing, and became fiercely loyal to him, as he was to the firm.

     Ray was then brought to New York to work in the corporate office and to run with the big dogs. Though he loved the challenge and the opportunity for further career advancement it provided him, he reluctantly slipped partially back into the closet and endured not only daily doses of verbal “fag” bashing, particularly by his new boss, but also an acute separation from me, who had stayed in Massachusetts, and from a safe space where gay pride permeated every room of our new home. Ray lived alone in an apartment Monday through Thursday and we talked at length on the phone every night. On Friday he would fly to Boston, and then drive an hour to our place in Gloucester, and for two days feel whole again. Those weekends were precious to us both.