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Heading Home
We laughed throughout the long elephant ride in the thunderstorm that drenched (but cooled) my favorite city in India, Jaipur. I uselessly held an umbrella over our heads like Mary Poppins as Ray and his bad back bounced, camera in hand, in all directions.
"You should see the elephant’s ear," he said sitting side-saddle, looking down from the front.
"You should see his ass," I replied leaning down off the back. Read more…
Mumbai & Delhi
Delhi, the nation’s capitol and the Indian state that last year decriminalized homosexual intimacy, was a complete surprise to us when we landed here today. Despite knowing that it is the seat of government, we expected to see the same abject poverty along the route from the airport as we had seen just two hours earlier on our sad exit from Mumbai. Instead of shanty towns along rutted roads, we saw a clean and elegant city with the classy feel of Washington, D.C. We were taken aback by the sophisticated roadways, the impressive monuments, and the beautiful government buildings, and we felt quite at home with the rotaries and the abundantly blooming bougainvillea and frangapani. Read more…
Reflections on Japan
If I don’t write, I don’t sleep. Impressions of our time in Japan have begged to be captured so that I didn’t lose them and could freely focus on the next unique experience.
Keeping up to date has been a challenge on this trip because my T-Mobile Blackberry didn’t have service in Japan, Ray’s modern touch-pad Verizon Blackberry had service but its super-sensitive system confounded me, and the Hyatt’s computer wouldn’t allow me to send messages. I was forced to await our arrival in India to offer these impressions of Japan. Read more…
The Script to My Drama
When I told my pain management doctor that I was heading to Tokyo and India to work with Merrill, he asked me if "Merrill" was my sister. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in our own dramas we forget that not everyone has seen our script.
Merrill is Merrill Lynch, the investment banking firm, more accurately known today as Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. My sisters’ names, for the record, are Kathy and Maureen. They are not coming with me to Asia. Ray is.
The script for this trip is well worth seeing. The synopsis is that Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs are bringing me to Japan to work with their senior executives on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues. After two presentations in Tokyo, I am going with Merrill to Mumbai for another groundbreaking talk with their senior executives in India.
For me and others working on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues, the invitation by Merrill and Goldman is enormously significant. These historic talks are the first efforts being made by corporations to ensure that their workplaces in those cultures are as welcoming for gay and transgender people as they are in New York, Toronto, or London. Besides the immediate effect of building the confidence and competence of the senior managers in my trainings, there is great potential for rippling effects upon diversity efforts in other local companies, as well as on attitudes in the culture. A person educated about gay and transgender people is more likely to be an ally when someone comes out in the family or the neighborhood. Read more…
Bisexuality & Gender Expression: The Shared Experience
If it is safe to tell the truth, the majority of people are both bisexual and transgender.
Suggesting that most people have the capacity to be physically attracted to both sexes is not new and revolutionary. The renowned Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung asserted as much. If there were no cultural taboos, nor fears of ramifications on a relationship, the majority of men—and certainly of women—would acknowledge their "bi-curious" nature. Very few people are completely same-sex oriented and very few people are exclusively other-sex attracted.
In saying that the majority of people are transgender, I am positing that most men and women have in their nature the capacity to express both their masculinity and their femininity. Without social taboos, women and men would regularly express all aspects of their gender make-up. Very few people are truly completely incongruent with the sex of their birth. If everyone were allowed to express him or herself as they feel called, there would be far less need for sex reassignment surgery. Read more…
Questions at the Dinner Table
As anyone who has watched the hit television series, Brothers and Sisters knows, if you get invited to dine with the Walkers, politely decline. You will otherwise get pulled into a donnybrook of quarreling. But what if you were invited to have dinner with a handful of the people you most admire? Would you go, and what would you want to discuss? Read more…
Big Names in Big Business
We didn’t stay up until the end of this year’s Academy Awards, and haven’t since we lived in San Francisco (where we could do so and still be in bed by 9 p.m.,) but Ray and I were intent on seeing Neil Patrick Harris mesmerize the crowd in the award show’s opening number. As must have been true for most women viewers when Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman in history to win the Oscar for Best Director, Ray and I take extra-special pleasure and pride in the accomplishments of other gay people.
That’s not so hard to do today, especially in the arts. Think of Lily Tomlin, Ellen DeGeneres, Merv Griffin, Paul Lynd, Tennessee Williams, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Rosie O’Donnell, and Stephen Sondheim, to name just a few. Fran Leibovitz once wrote that "…if you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal." Read more…
Making Rhyme & Reason on College Grads Coming Out at Work
Jack and Jill came out in school,
but went back in the closet.
Jack was sad, and Jill was mad,
and their employer lost ’cause of it.
A writer for Jungle Campus, an employment magazine aimed at college students, asked me:
Should gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender graduates come out at work?
A better question, I suggested, is how and when—not if—they should come out on the job. Read more…
“Ex-Gays” Need X-Men
There is a resolution being proposed by a single Disney stockholder to amend the company’s non-discrimination policy to explicitly include the prohibition of discrimination based on "ex-gay" status. Disney has wisely and predictably advised its stockholders to vote "no". It is the first such resolution of its kind that I’ve heard of, but given the overblown proselytizing nature of the so-called Religious Right’s "Ex-Gay Movement", it probably won’t be the last. Bring it on. Read more…
The Dilemma of Being Out & Invisible
Perhaps a discussion of the oppression gay men and women face around the corporate water cooler seems insignificant when compared to more outrageous examples of the day: the proposed legislation in Uganda that calls for imprisonment and death for gay and HIV-positive people, the arrest of a gay couple in Malawi simply for having an engagement party, the Gestapo tactics of the Atlanta and Fort Worth police in their recent raids of gay bars in those cities, among other atrocities. Certainly in comparison to the blatant homophobia I witnessed in the workplace when I first began diversity training there 25 years ago, leaving gay people out of social discussions is far less physically and emotionally threatening. But everything is relative to the context in which it occurs. Read more…
