Brian McNaught's Gay & Transgender Issues in the Workplace Blog

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Much has been made—and rightly so—of the fortitude of the generation that fought World War II, but little is said of their children, the greatest generation of workers. At no time in human history have people been required to stretch so far beyond their emotional comfort zones to understand and value others who represent many differences, to be relocated so often, to be forced to learn new skills in order to survive, and to lack so much security in their jobs.

In the past 50 years, the average person in most Western cultures has been called upon to treat with professional respect as an equal team member people they were raised since childhood to fear and hate. This generation of workers has done so not without struggle but more so with grace, acceptance, and understanding. And no one says to them, "Thank you." This same generation has been forced to give up white, male, Christian, and heterosexual privilege. Their families have needed to be flexible enough to change schools, doctors, dentists, and all else that was familiar in order to accommodate reassignments. And few employees could trust that the company they signed on to serve would maintain ownership, size, purpose, or benefits. Read more…

When I die, my good friend Bob Witeck has promised he will notify people that I’m gone. Given Bob’s great skills as a public relations and marketing genius, he will undoubtedly make my passing seem like it was a significant event. It will be a bigger deal when Bob dies and, like so many of life’s injustices, his many accomplishments in the work world won’t be adequately noted. Though he wasn’t listed with Tom Ford, Lily Tomlin, Cherry Jones, and Neil Patrick Harris in The Advocate’s predictably West Coast, star-dazed "Year in Review", Bob’s annual contributions to the everyday lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people far exceeds that of these gay celebrities. So too do his efforts on behalf of people with disabilities and those with HIV. Read more…

When I was a child, a favorite kindergarten game we played asked the question, "Ducky, ducky, how’s your neighbor?" The response was, "I don’t know, but I’ll go see." It was the tagged person’s job to then go ask the same question to another child.

In the adult version, the question is "Gay and transgender employees, how are your counterparts in other places?" And the answer today must be, "We don’t know, but we’ll go see." Gay and transgender people who work in corporate offices in New York need to find out how their counterparts are doing in Colorado Springs, Mobile, Singapore, and Dubai. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees in Toronto need to need to know what it’s like to work in Calgary and those in London need to address what’s happening in Bournemouth and Mumbai. If it isn’t ducky, all resources need to be pulled together to ensure that corporate policy transcends cultural and regional differences, even if same-sex intimacy is punishable by law in those sites. Read more…