The New York Times: At Work; The Unfolding of Gay Culture

The following interview with Joe McCormack by Barbara Presley Noble was featured in The New York Times. View the original source here.

CHOOSE a media source, any media source. This is what you've seen recently: A sea of people, stretching from a stage at the foot of Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument, cheering as a color guard and a group of uniformed gay men and lesbians march in and brace at attention. They are not the Village People and the song is not "In the Navy." Lesbians hug on the cover of Newsweek. RuPaul, "super model of the world," sashays in drag on MTV and makes the wig a political statement. Country-and-western chantoosie/lesbian frissonmeister K.D. Lang comes out, but it's her vegetarianism that causes controversy. Celebrations of gay pride no longer seem relegated to the month of June.

Change may not be as -- pardon the adjective -- flamboyant in the workplace, but it is occurring, person by person, enterprise by enterprise, all over the country.

Take Joseph McCormack. His 3-month-old firm, McCormack & Associates, in Los Angeles, appears to be the first executive search firm specializing in gay and lesbian talent. That might seem like a narrow and potentially perilous niche, but Mr. McCormack expects the social changes that made his specialty possible, especially the increasing number of lesbians and gay men willing to come out at work, to survive the American public's current approach-avoidance fascination with gay culture.

"Gay men and lesbians are no longer willing to hide," Mr. McCormack said. "There is a hunger to be open and have an integrated life." Since a brief mention in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, he has received more than 200 resumes and inquiries from a handful of for-profit companies.

Mr. McCormack, who has been a headhunter for 17 years, went out on his own in April after working for two years on behalf of gay and lesbian organizations and AIDS service providers. Groups that started out small and grassroots at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic have grown into multi million-dollar agencies that need professional leadership.

He is likely to benefit from several converging forces. Consumer-oriented companies already are quickly becoming aware that the gay market has clout, perhaps out of proportion with its numbers -- whatever they are -- but not out of line with its affluent income. Companies that want to attract a gay audience, from liquor makers to insurance companies, are starting to look for executives who know the territory.

The territory covers a vocal, sometimes fractious and savvy population that knows how to leverage its influence. "The gay community is sophisticated enough to pick up hypocrisy. It won't support companies that discriminate," Mr. McCormack said.

The gays-in-the-military controversy is likely to have a tremendous long-term impact, Mr. McCormack believes, however the immediate controversy is resolved next month. He has done searches for defense-related companies and like others familiar with the industry thinks the military will eventually yield and grant full citizenship to gay and lesbian personnel. Once the military adopts a nondiscrimination policy, the reverberations will be powerful because companies that do business with the Government are bound by equal opportunity rules. "Others will follow," Mr. McCormack said.

* Some shareholder activists and institutional investors have used their clout to urge companies to take a stand on social issues, for example, to expand equal opportunity programs or to abstain from doing business with South Africa under apartheid. The Wall Street Project, sponsored by the Community Lesbian and Gay Rights Institute in New York, would like investors to use their influence to push companies to eliminate discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the workplace. Earlier this month the group began sending out a survey on equal-opportunity policies to Fortune 1,000 companies.

* Electronic mail has been a critical component, especially at high-tech companies, of increased gay visibility in the workplace, allowing communication without revelation. But the good, old Luddite printed word still has a solid place, in two newsletters: Working It Out, whose target market is the corporate manager, and The Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual Corporate Letter, for employees. Both are relatively new (in the last year or so) and small (100-200 subscribers).

Because companies want to know where they stand and no company wants to be too far out in front of it siblings on any controversial issue, the two publications, both based in New York, could come to play a clearinghouse role that is now unfilled. "There is a need for information," said Ed Mickens, editor of Working It Out. "Companies are concerned and waking up."

* As far as can be determined, people prominent in gays-in-the-workplace circles have only one thing in common with the late Bush Administration: everyone seems to have a book contract.

Mr. Mickens is writing about the 100 best companies for gay people to work in, ranked on such issues as whether the company has an antidiscrimination policy, offers domestic partner benefits or encourages an atmosphere of tolerance. Jay Lucas, of the diversity consulting firm Kaplan, Lucas & Associates, in Philadelphia, collaborated with James D. Woods on "The Corporate Closet: The Professional Lives of Gay Men in America," due out in August. Brian McNaught, by all accounts the godfather of gay diversity and sensitivity training, recounts his 20 years of experience and offers advice to managers and straight employees in "Gay Issues in the Workplace," scheduled for publication in November. He also has a new video out, of gay employees talking about their experiences. RuPaul, alas, does not appear.