2005
The Out at Work Thing
I’ve been out at work for about 10 years, now, I think. I’m a journalist, working at a daily newspaper. At the time I came out I was actually the token woman in the paper’s sports department, so you can imagine, I was surrounded by real sensitive guys.
*cough*
It all came about because I was just so sick of playing the pronoun game. And trying to pretend I wasn’t sleeping with the only female photographer. Plus I was coming out in other areas of my life as well, although I left it a while longer to let the parental units in on the secret.
Generally, the guys I was working with reacted pretty well. I had the usual male prurient interest in what it is two women do in bed. And could I please describe it in detail? And did I have any photographs?
Nothing too unexpected there. These were the same guys who rated the female journalists as they walked past on their way to the coffee pot, after all. One of the guys turned to me one day and asked: “Are you really a carpet-muncher?”
So sophisticated, the lads.
Despite working in a building with about 500 other people I remain, 10 years on, the only out homosexual I know of. That’s disappointing to me. I guess I kind of hoped that people would see that my coming out had been relatively painless and would follow suit, but apparently it’s not to be. Que se ra, se ra. It’s their call.
I’ve only had one negative experience at work. We used to have an internal staff newspaper that came out monthly. Basically it was to give the cadets experience in putting together a newspaper. One month a cadet interviewed every journo in the newsroom about their first kiss. The deputy editor refused to publish mine because I was ‘making a political statement’. I complained, the story got yanked. Oh, and that was the last edition of the internal newspaper. Shame.
Other than that, I write a fortnightly column for the paper. I’m not allowed to talk too much about being gay, though I do manage to work it in every now and then. The Editor-in-Chief is a homophobe (little does he know his youngest son is a renowned Queer About Town) and he gets a facial tic if I put the words gay, lesbian or queer too often in the column. But I find ways around it.
All in all, it’s been a positive thing.
