A New Acceptance : Gay Support Groups Are Beginning to Pay Off in the Workplace

On a recent flight from Montreal to Los Angeles, Xerox manager Al Lewis opened a book titled “Love Between Men: Enhancing Intimacy and Keeping Your Relationship Alive.”

“All of a sudden I hear someone calling my name, and I look over my head and there’s a Xerox employee sitting right behind me who works on my floor in El Segundo,” Lewis said.

“Five or six years ago I would have quietly closed the book and hoped he didn’t see the title. This time it didn’t bother me in the least. We sat there and talked about the book.

“I feel much more relaxed, much more myself. I don’t spend as much energy playing like I’m somebody that I’m really not.”

Lewis is among thousands of gays and lesbians nationwide who have formed support groups in the workplace in the hopes of transforming their corporate culture. These organizations have asked for--and received--written policies prohibiting discrimination based on employees’ sexual orientation. They conduct seminars for heterosexual employees on lesbian and gay life, serve as a management resource on gay and lesbian issues, help employees fight harassment on the job, and search for life insurance companies that accept same-sex partners as beneficiaries.

Employees such as Lewis say the support groups allow them to expend less energy hiding their sexual orientation and put more effort into their jobs. Executives at corporations that encourage support groups simply point to the bottom line: employees who feel comfortable in the workplace are good for profits.

“A company that allows people to be comfortable with who they are is going to attract the best people,” confirmed Alan Zimmerle, a corporate manager in human resources at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) headquarters in Maynard, Mass. About 600 gay and lesbian Digital employees worldwide communicate on one electronic mail line, and employees in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have organized one support group focusing on social life and another dealing with corporate issues. “By valuing people’s differences, we gain a competitive edge because we become the employer of choice.”

“It used to be that we forced people in the workplace to conform,” said David L. Bradford, a lecturer in organizational behavior at the graduate school of business at Stanford University. “We made them wear white shirts and three-piece suits. In the new phase of industrial organization, the question is: How can we value diversity? In today’s fast-changing world, an organization that can take advantage of internal differences will be much more adaptive. . . .”

Bradford added, “If you have an organization of white males and want to market to women internationally, for example, you will not have anyone who understands your market.”

A small but rapidly growing number of employers nationwide provide supplies, publicity, meeting space, computer communication lines and corporate vehicles for the support groups, which started to crop up in the late 1980s.

Said Walter Williams, a USC associate professor of anthropology who specializes in societal attitudes toward sexuality, “We see much more massive numbers (of gay employees) who have revealed their identities in the workplace and organized either informally on the social level or formally through institutionalized caucuses.”

Understandably, said Williams, the groups have been established at “newer, innovative companies that tend to be dominated by more innovative individuals just because they are in new fields.”

Gay and lesbian employees have organized locally at UCLA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, several South Bay offices of the Xerox Corp. and the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. Groups have also formed at Apple Computer Inc., Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems Inc. in the San Francisco Bay area.

Outside California, organizations have been sanctioned at Digital offices in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Georgia and at 10 offices of U S WEST Communications, the successor to Bell Telephone, in Boise, Ida., Denver, Des Moines, Iowa, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Omaha, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, Seattle and Tucson.

These groups, ranging from two workers at U S WEST in Boise to 250 in a social organization at DEC, have taken significant steps to improve their corporate environment.

* At Apple Computer in Cupertino, Calif., gay employees pressed for and received an amendment in the company hiring policy that prohibits discrimination based on “sexual orientation.”

* Groups at Xerox and RAND urged their companies, which were considering similar amendments to their hiring policies, to act on them. The changes were quickly approved.

* At Digital, one gay support group, the DEC Policy and Action Committee, persuaded management to offer educational programs throughout the company on gay and lesbian life. The seminars are presented almost every week somewhere among the company’s 70,000 U.S. employees, Zimmerle said.

* At UCLA, members of the Lesbian and Gay Faculty-Staff Network met with chancellor Charles E. Young and persuaded him to create the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the Gay and Lesbian Community at UCLA. Four Faculty-Staff Network members serve on the 15-member advisory committee, which is considering creation of a campus center where gay and lesbian students could turn for help or information.

* At RAND, members of the Lambda Link group hold periodic educational meetings--which have included a seminar on work-related and interpersonal aspects of AIDS and a film on slain San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk--for fellow employees. About 40 people usually attend the gatherings.

* Gay employees at Xerox created a computer message system, which is used to help solve common problems. This year message writers helped one gay employee find a life insurance policy that would accept a same-sex partner as beneficiary. They also helped an employee obtain a homeowner’s policy for herself and her partner.

Activists say the next corporate battleground may be over equal medical benefits for same-sex spouses.

“If I have a spouse and children, they can’t get the same medical benefits that you can if you are married,” said Brad Rubenstein, part of the technical staff at Sun Microsystems Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., and one of 75 members of Gays, Lesbians and Friends (GLAF) at Sun. Rubenstein said GLAF and management are discussing alternative insurance systems that would provide those benefits.

Williams said the support groups are an extension of organizing efforts within the gay community that started in the 1950s. But it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that large numbers took the more difficult steps of revealing their sexual identities to families and co-workers.

“As people became more and more out socially and more and more confident by reason of a more solid gay community,” Williams said, “it gave more people the sense of pride to say ‘Hey, it’s time to stop hiding.’ ”

The AIDS epidemic also made activists out of many homosexuals who would have remained spectators a decade ago.

“A young man I know is in the later stages of AIDS,” said San Francisco journalist Arthur Lazere who from 1981-89 wrote an internationally syndicated column on gays in the workplace.

“He has dementia. He’s incontinent. He probably has less than six months to live. Yet no acute-care hospital will admit him because he has no acute disease at this time. . . . They (gays) get angry and see it could happen to them, too. All of a sudden your value system changes. You might be more willing to come out of the closet.”

“If you can create any example similar to the Holocaust and the way it affected the Jewish community, it is having that impact on our community,” said James Kelly, professor and director of the social work program at Cal State Long Beach.

“The Holocaust mobilized the Jewish community forever. People are not going to sit back and let it happen again. . . . You have to stand up and be your own advocate. That’s the one thing AIDS has taught us. . . . People are much more active, particularly in the work force.”

Gay and lesbian activists in the workplace have followed steps taken 10 or 20 years ago by members of gay organizations such as the Southern California Physicians for Human Rights and the Los Angeles Lawyers for Human Rights, an affiliate of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.

Peter M. Nardi, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College and a past chairman of the Lesbian and Gay Caucus of the American Sociological Assn., said the professional and workplace support groups probably emerged for the same reasons, including a sense of alienation from the social and intellectual life of professional gatherings.

Observers and participants agree that while the groups would have been almost unthinkable in a corporate setting 20 years ago, they have not eliminated problems for homosexuals on the job.

“In some work groups at Xerox homophobia seems non-existent,” said Bill Humphrey, a printing systems manager in El Segundo. But “there are still some groups of employees here in which it is socially acceptable to make (anti-gay) jokes.”

Jeffery Nunes, one of a dozen technical staff members who recently received company approval to organize at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the same is true at his workplace.

“Where one person may have a very positive experience coming out,” he said, “another person may have a very negative experience . . . and leave the lab. So there’s a lot of variability.”

Nevertheless, many members said that support groups have helped them build a kinder, gentler workplace atmosphere.

“We’ve done a lot of consciousness-raising,” said Bennet Marks who founded the gay and lesbian group at Apple Computers Inc. in Cupertino in 1986. “People know there are gay employees who have particular concerns.

“The company has been very supportive. They understand that these are people who have come together for a reason and are worth paying attention to.”

“I have seen more people speaking out about gay and lesbian issues,” said Dawn Tubbs, a Seattle clerk who is a regional vice president of the 10 U S West support groups.

“People are less apt to collude with improper treatment of gays and lesbians. I don’t hear nearly the number of (anti-gay) jokes I used to.

“I guess I would most clearly measure the change by going back to the Seattle chapter’s presence in the Gay Pride march. The company has a minivan which is basically a go-cart with a fiberglass body with the company logo, colors and striping on it.

“Three years ago we asked to use the vehicle in the annual parade and were turned down flat. Last year we made a formal request and were given permission to use it. This year the folks who control that vehicle called us and asked what day we wanted it.”