I am out to my friends and family, but professionally closeted, somewhat anyway. If you’re able to see what’s in front of you, without the assumption of heterosexuality, you’ll notice me. In part, this professional closet is just a professional veneer, topics that I don’t bring up because they’re not appropriate for the workplace. But I think that professional attitude is itself a tell. After all, from entry level to management, their heterosexuality explicitly comes up. I don’t mean the wives either. One evening a section head graced me with the knowledge that in his youth he attended a couple swingers’ parties and orgies, but, he claimed he did not participate. Unfortunately, he also let me know that his son’s grades were slipping, which wasn’t as bad as what his friend was dealing with, whose son had just come out. How he got to these topics from asking him if he had any career advice is beyond me.
Unfortunately, I naturally present more masculine and this lets my coworkers initially read me as straight, which lets them be more honest about their negative opinions on queer people. That manager’s statement was relatively benign. After all, grades don’t seem to define the structure of your life quite the same way that your sexuality does and he could have been reflecting on how that young man would have to deal with the prejudices of a straight environment. But I’ve had other coworkers refer to difficult contractors as “cocksuckers” and “maricones.” Again, my straight coworkers have no problem dropping any suggestion of a professional attitude to say offensive bullshit without caring who might be listening. It is frustrating, but I can pretend that they don’t know and brush it off a little more casually.
That’s not to say that the psychological damage of being professionally closeted is not building up over time though. After all, it’s not just the effort I make to drop pronouns and refer to every ex boyfriend as an ex, but learning directly from my coworkers that they would think less of me if I came out to them. It almost feels dirty, as though I’m a spy behind enemy lines gathering intel. With that intel, I do begin to look down on them, categorizing them as people who are somewhat bigoted and thus people I need to continue to be dishonest with. Frankly, always having to tiptoe around these people lest I trigger their delicate heterosexuality gets tiring and expends energy I could spend elsewhere. In my defense, I have come out to some of them to test the waters of being more out professionally.
A couple of coworkers decided to grab dinner and drinks together after a work meeting. I had to leave early and as I was leaving mentioned that I was leaving for a date. A coworker told another and so forth until it got back to the specific construction site I was regularly on. The project inspector told me had heard about it and asked if I had a girlfriend now and I responded, “Well, no, I have a boyfriend.” I had gotten to know him well enough by now to be sure that whatever happened, he would not risk his job by being too explicit with whatever he felt about that. As expected, he quickly dropped the topic. But a different engineer and I got drinks way later and he let me know that the inspector was very uncomfortable from that day forward whenever I was around, even though we had been working together for a year by then and would work together for another year more.
Reactions such as those, the casual homophobia as well, those are the reasons why for now I don’t feel too guilty to continue lying by omission, for staying in the closet for now. After all, these people presume heterosexuality and to clarify that now reveals a bit too much for me. There’s an author and columnist I’ve been reading since I was young, Dan Savage, who has this idea that there’s the people you’re saying you’re fucking, the people you want to fuck, and the people you’re fucking. In my case, single and theoretically willing to mingle, I’m stopping at the level of people I want to fuck as a need to know basis and my coworkers don’t need to know. The hilarious byproduct is that my coworkers think I’m a bit of a sexual prude, but after all, I’m never letting them know I’ve been to bathhouses and nude beaches. I do intend to drop the act though. For example, I’ll definitely need to mention a stable partner or husband, but even before then, the cost of being professionally closeted is too annoying, especially as I intend to climb the ranks. Plus, I’m going through all of this out of concern for coworkers who do not themselves maintain any sort of filter for respectability or for the comfort of others.
There’s two more things to share right now, although I am aware this is getting long. First, there was a time in college where not being fully out significantly hurt me, as I detailed here, although I need to elaborate more. Second, I wanted to focus on the coworkers that make it a necessity to remain partially professionally closeted. However, there’s thankfully some other LGBT coworkers here and there as well as more and more young people coming into the workplace, some still holding on to biases but largely friendlier to the queer community.
