Still slamming shut an invisible closet door

One of the most unfortunate habits of the corporate diversity industry is a tendency to put up a sign, email round a policy, joyfully declare victory and move on.
Even the best intentioned people and firms allow LGBT equality to fall off the real radar in lock step with sustained efforts to make it a reality. (A simple way to remember the colours in the Pride flag is instructive.)
Pride must must be an everyday reality, not just be a parade. In too many organisations this is not — and cannot be — the case. One reason is that those involved in diversity policy tend to be people in a job — like internal comms — that must be seen to be ‘doing something’ all the time. That something must be visible and new — not quiet or deeply felt, nor long term. Trouble is, some new visible things are better than others.
Try to start up a running club or ‘hooping’ association (please not the latter) and no-one will have an issue — they might even help. A little. Try to start some kind of LGBT network, and the reception will be rather more …. measured. Slow. Careful. Resistant. Suspicious. Lots of reasons not to. Great idea. Why now? Nice idea. Not now. Maybe not ever. Maybe it is redundant or just not the right time.
You will hear (as we have heard):
“We already have a diversity policy. Why are you questioning it?”
“This is a very gay friendly workplace — I think I saw one of them earlier — and we have show tunes on the office Spotify list. Aren’t you being a bit militant? Calm down. We don’t need this”
“Isn’t there one of those rainbow stickers somewhere? I think I saw something in the loos?”
“If you do this, we’ll have to set up networks for Romanians and Mexicans and everyone else. It’s not fair; and we have to draw a line somewhere.”
“Why are we doing this — and why are you asking me about it — are you accusing me of being gay?”
“Nice idea. Great. We’ll get back to you on that … maybe after your next review?”
And then you might just get the message and give up. You can be out of the closet yet nowhere worthwhile at the same time. Easily.
Diversity careerists are concerned with labels and language — being seen and heard to be feeling and doing the right thing, at the right time, in front of the right people. Not making a long term and open commitment to equality — because that has costs. Maybe that Persian Gulf-based conglomerate or Putin propaganda pipe channel might not appoint you if your agency is a bit too big on the LGBT thing. We have to remember, this war will never be over, and LGBT rights are only even slightly on the agenda in a pretty small and pretty Western part of the planet.
As the godfather of memorable marketing Bill Bernbach allegedly said “Your values don’t mean shit until they cost you money.”
Another reason Pride must must be an everyday reality is because of an assumption — unconscious or otherwise — that LGBT equality is subject to the same rule of ‘compassion fatigue’ that means any cause marketer must announce some kind of victory and move on to a new cause in order to ensure continued attention.
Some professional service firms that profess concern about LGBT rights also ‘pride’ themselves by sending lovely young people to build potentially unnecessary schools, orphanages and ditches in aid of Neanderthal governments who think LGBTQI stands for ‘Let’s Get the Bastards and Torture the Queers in Imprisonment’. Countries where the only acceptable venue for a one time only Pride parade would be in a prison … or preferably an abattoir.
But who said neophiliacs were ever consistent in their love for the downtrodden?
The two problems are interrelated — one is the fact it is often the wrong people in charge of any kind of ‘diversity’ initiative. The other is an even more insidious misunderstanding about what diversity is, and should mean.
Compassion fatigue is a well-known phenomenon amongst sentient cause marketers. Busy, normal people have only so much mental bandwidth available to care about people not like themselves.
Stop and read the end of that sentence and you will find the key to all patronising, unsuccessful and tokenistic attempts at diversity, equality or any kind of civil (i.e. human) rights.
By ‘celebrating’ the alternative fact that people who just happen to be gay are really very, very ever so wonderfully different like that nice camp man on the telly — a basic human rights requirement becomes a virtue signalling novelty, soon to be replaced with others. It also confers a requirement on real people to be cartoons in order to be ‘tolerated’.
Lord Browne, former chairman of BP, and Lord Mandelson, one of the prime architects of three consecutive Labour victories are subject to far more suspicion, prejudice and hatred from peers and press alike because they do not camp it up to level eleven. Simon Hughes — a former MP of near universal acclaim is a bisexual who has lived much of his life in fear — he was (and often still is) just seen as scary. Even by his own Party, the Liberal Democrats. It is the main reason he was rejected as a leadership candidate. Despite being the strongest and best choice at the time. By far. He was the one the other parties feared the most.
Your own correspondent has often witnessed gay men bullied to the edge of madness for not knowing the correct way to be ‘gay’. They were ‘out’, but many, many people did not believe them; they just had a ‘problem of being shy with girls’. Loving the ‘wrong’music, having the ‘wrong’ political views and just being awkward dancers at company parties are all clear signs of a Fake Gay.
Here are gay men that are not ‘acting gay’; they are just being themselves. People who have a label applied to them that do not behave as the label says they should are terrifyingly weird to many people. Many people — disproportionately straight white men of a certain age — just do not know how to ‘place’ them.
To the diversity industry and its dark heart of cause marketing people being people just will not do.
But there are some bright spots defying this diversity racket.
The banking industry seems to have a better record on Pride than most. Why? It is not because it is somehow ‘nicer’. The very nature of the banking business means it has to. It is based on trust and relationships — especially at the highest level. You cannot expect to be trusted if you have to hide who you are, or if you ask your employees to do so, or if your clients are expected to do the same.
You also cannot show hostility to a very important source of talent, and money. Where money comes from and where it goes carries no prejudice, and by the way, LGBT people tend to be more enthused investors than most. And very, very hard workers.
LGBTs have to be to compensate for the undying prejudice. Big tech also has a great legacy of Pride. The technology giant IBM started getting very concerned about recruiting, protecting, organising and promoting gay employees in 1984. This was when such an idea was far more likely to be a pathetic homophobic punchline than a corporate policy.
Again, in an industry based on what you can do, rather than who you are or someone else thinks you are, getting on board with Pride before it had a name was not just a moral imperative, it was a business necessity.
For some reason, the marketing and communications industry is always late to communicate important things … like a commitment to LGBT rights.
In 2015, the Great and the Good finally got together, at least thirty three years too late, to do something about LGBT discrimination in leadership. LGBT leaders deemed it necessary to do that ‘thing that’ so many clearly thought had already been done.
We must wish them well — their site is a good showcase for some interesting LGBT-oriented work — but it is yet to pick up much traction and sure could do with more investment. (One wonders if any of those ever so diverse big name agencies have ponied up any paid media support, or talent, to pitch in?)
The truth is that, in the end, LGBT people are just people. In fact, someone’s sexuality is the least defining and interesting way to understand them as an individual. As politicians who play the identity card hard have found to their cost (and to the world’s).
This means LGBTs who are living and breathing individual human beings, with dreams of their own, rather than cartoons are very very boring for the diversity careerist. They are just not that ‘different’ in reality.
Watch out for LGBT concerns to start to fade from the agenda as society creates new, far more visible and eager to self stereotype — ‘minorities’. People who want to be classed as androids on their passports, or self identify as quadrupeds, do exist and will be seen by many as a far more worthy, visible cause.
Now that we can all move on from LGBT stuff — as they are on telly and we have a rainbow flag and it’s all fine — would it not be a lot more radical, career enhancing and just fun to step-up for the oppressed cyborgs and ‘furries’ rather than those boring old gays (they have been around forever).
Bollocks to all this diversity diversion careerism and cause marketing malignancy.
Make Pride a reminder that this is a fight worth having which will never be over.
And real pride is a day to day, visible reality, that we are all just people first and foremost, whomever we love.
There is some great work out there which truly shows how genuine LGBT inclusion is not about creating usually patronising executions aimed at a specific ‘group’. See above — there are only individuals, some of whom just happen to be gay.
Great work is art that does not patronise, it respects the fact people are people, while bringing the beauty, joy and wit of LGBT culture to everyone.
This classic but too hard to find (why?!) spot from Ford UK excludes no-one, amuses everyone with a soul while being very clear it is has been created with a gay leaning creative palette. Watch it then watch it again. It is real Pride in action.
