A coming out story

I’m in a Teams meeting with a senior leader from a well-known FMCG company whose values evangelise belonging. We’re discussing a leadership conference at which I’m hoping to speak. 

A few minutes in, the client (let’s call her Carol*) adopts the demeanour of the career diplomat conveying regrettable news from the powers that be.

“You’re obviously an expert in leadership and organisational change. Rachel* speaks so highly of you. And we’d like to offer you a speaking slot, but…”

A pensive pause.

“…Do you have any other team members?”

“Other team members?”

“Yes. Maybe someone who is…” [another pensive pause] “…a little more representative of the goals we have for this event. We’re trying to make sure we have the right kinds of people onstage. I’m sure you understand.”

I do. But what I also think is: well, there’s a lot you don’t know about me.

I wonder if I should tell her some of it. 

But instead I nod and say nothing and feel somehow excluded from the FMCG company whose values evangelise belonging.

Here are a few things you don’t know about me.

I’m gay. I was brought up in the evangelical Christian church and a repressive school system in the vicious grip of Section 28 – environments that weren’t exactly supportive of who I was. In the nineties, the AIDS crisis cast a long shadow over the lives of gay teens and men like me; amongst many other things it meant walking through the world with a constant fear of violence, both verbal and physical. Discrimination laws had not yet come into full force. Coming out was a risky act. In my early twenties, in the face of what felt like relentless shame and rejection, and some other personal difficulties, I had a breakdown. I rebuilt my life slowly from that point with little help from anyone or anything, except a remarkable man who is now my husband.

You wouldn’t know any of this because I don’t speak about it. In part this is because it’s nobody’s business but mine, as are the details of your life to you. I also fear that it sounds like I’m panning for sympathy (that most patronising of sentiments). And, in a professional context, I have long held the view that my personal history is irrelevant. I have told myself that I can do my work without coming out.

But, as time has gone by, I have started to wonder if that view is a convenient fiction that disguises a deeper, more revealing truth. Because my journey is relevant to my work. The paragraph-long sketch above adumbrated about twenty years of coaching and therapy: a slow grind of self-discovery that I didn’t wish for but undertook because the alternative was too dark to contemplate. The path I’ve taken has taught me a great deal about myself and the world around me, and the myriad ways in which we can torture ourselves and one another. 

I have grown to see that the animating drive behind my practice isn’t leadership or culture or organisational development, as good as I am at that stuff. It’s a desire to help other people feel less alone. See, if I am a virtuoso in anything, it’s aloneness in all its forms. How a person can walk through the world feeling as though they’re always on the outside. How isolated someone can feel even when surrounded by others. What it feels like to have traumatic experiences that others have the luxury of not knowing are commonplace for people like you.

And it is this deep, lived experience of aloneness – and its attendant feelings of otherness, bewilderment and sadness – that has helped me become the coach and consultant that I am.

To face existential problems that you do not know how to solve, when you have an entire organisation expecting you to do just that.

To feel as though you are somehow wired in a different way to those you lead, with all the difficulties in human relationships that this can cause. 

To try to make yourself heard amongst others and sense that you are failing.

To feel overwhelmed in the face of a working world that is indifferent to your survival, let alone prosperity.

These are just some of the problems of aloneness – really, the problems that come with being human – that, left unchecked, can cause big business problems. And, at root, these are the problems I help leaders to fix.

When I reflect on this, I see how my entire career has been shaped by my experiences growing up in a world that didn’t make sense to me, didn’t work as I needed it to work, and in which I couldn’t find a way to belong. In that sense, the pain has been a gift.

So of course my experience is relevant to my work. The question is, why not come out about who I am?

Back on the Teams call, I commit to having a conversation with my colleagues about whether one of them might speak for the FMCG company whose values evangelise belonging.

I don’t do this. Instead, I dial my business partner. I’d like to tell you that I embarked on this call in a state of Zen-like acceptance of the events in question. But I’m not the Buddha. I’m a gay man with scars. Deep breath.

“So that f***ing ignorant, self-satisfied woman has just put me in a position where I felt like I had two choices. One, accept her bullshit premise, in which case my entire life experience gets dismissed as though it doesn’t count. Or, two, tell her that I’m gay. Which might have shut her up or given her pause for thought, I don’t know. 

“But I don’t owe Carol that part of my story. I don’t owe anyone my story. She’s never had to come out to ANYONE. F***ing clueless.”

Some of this isn’t wrong. I don’t believe that anyone straight can ever understand the process of coming out, for example. And I am sort of laughing as I say it. But I’m aware that behind my indignant ranting sits something bigger: a gnawing, lifelong fear of rejection. 

The thing is, Carol didn’t mean to cause harm. In fact, I am sure that she was doing what she felt was right and would have been upset to learn the impact of her actions. But what she hadn’t allowed herself to do was to have an encounter with a human being, in all his complexity, empathy and hidden difference. Instead, she took an easy short-cut: another generic white guy consultant, move on, nothing to see here. (I will come back to this, but suffice to say, this sort of snap judgment doesn’t only do a disservice to white guys who happen to be gay.)

This triggered me. The old wounds got reactivated, the nervous system went into overdrive, and the all-too-familiar rejection script kicked in. You might have been on the earth for 40+ years, but nothing changes. You will never be accepted. You will never belong. Whatever you do, it’ll never be good enough. The world is built around the needs of others. It is not meant for the likes of you. 

The welcome news is that the script is just that: a narrative, peddled by an ego that is always seeking an excuse to remain separate. Thanks to a lot of work, most of the time I can recognise it as such, process it, and move on.

But the experience did leave me with a few questions. What do I want my relationship with these sorts of corporate initiatives, and by extension the corporate world, to be? What is experience trying to tell me about the work that needs doing? How can I best help myself and others?

A couple of years later, the answers have taken on a new urgency.

In my twenties, I used to love a Pride parade – particularly the Manchester one, which always felt like a place of acceptance and celebration. There was, it seemed, a different way to live. Out we would go, for that longest of long weekends, and drink and dance ourselves out of our minds. The only logos in sight were those of the lager and spirit brands. And that felt right to me: this was our space.

A few years ago, long after my husband and I had retired into something approaching padded domesticity, we went to London Pride. We watched as the floats went past: KPMG, Barclays, Red Bull. And I felt happy for their people – if you’ve never seen a uniformed Barclays employee twerk, it’s a jarring, amusing sight – and pleased about the progress that it seemed to represent. 

But I also felt a reflexive kick of cold, hard anger. 

‘Where were these businesses twenty years ago’, I thought, ‘when discrimination was rife? When we couldn’t marry, and had no legal protections? When gay men with HIV couldn’t get insurance? If they weren’t here then, what gives them the right to be here NOW?’

Then I caught myself, and thought, no, focus on the positive, because progress is difficult and nonlinear, and it is better that these companies are here than not. Your pain is yours to carry. Don’t project it on to institutions that might finally be trying to do the right thing. If they’re trying to welcome in people who have felt alone, good. We’ve all suffered enough.

Cut to 2025, and Trump is back, authoritarianism is rising, and a worldwide assault is taking place on the very culture that led to those huge, branded Pride parades. DE&I initiatives are rapidly being rolled back everywhere we look. The corporate world seems to have folded to the new regime without a single nanosecond of self-examination. I am having to work hard to avoid feeling that my kick of cold, hard anger was well-aimed.

Indeed, given my history, it is difficult for me to look at the list of businesses abandoning their DE&I initiatives and not feel that in some sense it was always destined to be this way. It seemed to me that these brands discovered DE&I when the cost of not participating was greater than the cost of doing so. So it doesn’t feel surprising that as soon as the scales tip in the other direction they disavow it. That old Groucho Marx saying rings grim and true: “these are my principles and if you don’t like them, I have others”.

To defend the principle of DE&I is not to suggest that all such policies are perfect, and that some of them don’t deserve rigorous debate. It is all so complex. And I want to emphasise that I’m no expert in this domain. Indeed, I believe DE&I advocacy to be amongst the most demanding kind of work that anyone can lead. The balance of technocratic detail and relational competencies that is required to affect meaningful, systemic change boggles my mind. DE&I requires not only a nuanced grip on both policy and cultural contexts (which can vary wildly), but also an ability to enter the zone of uncomfortable conversations, and hold the line for a long time, in service of progress. 

I’ve always liked the comedian Stewart Lee’s definition of political correctness as “an often-clumsy negotiation towards a kind of formally inclusive language”. It strikes me that something similar applies to DE&I – it’s a sort of imperfect striving for a more equal, more pluralistic world. It’s imperfect because it involves human beings, and genuine progress is always messy.

So, what is the work that needs doing here?

As someone who works with the human stuff in business, and a member of a minority with a very real dog in this proverbial fight, I have a few thoughts. They are mine and mine alone, and I’m here to learn, so feedback of a non-trolling kind is welcome.

It seems to me that the table stakes for any progress to be possible are abandonment of anti-corporate schadenfreude (and I write this to myself as much as anyone else). It doesn’t help. Consult the tale of the scorpion and the frog: it tells us everything we need to know about blaming corporate entities for following financial incentives. Boycotting or challenging those companies might feel satisfying and be worth doing, if only for integrity’s sake.

But I sense that the real work lies in leaning into messy human emotions, in five ways.

1. Find and tend to those who need it

Take a look at all those companies reneging on DE&I. Within each of them is a plethora of people in minority groups for whom the working world might now feel a little less safe. It is too easy to condemn, say, Meta. But it is more important to remember that Meta is full of people who might be feeling that their career options are narrower than they were a couple of months ago.

Even if careers remain unaffected, the symbolism of these policy changes is awful. Initiatives whose stated intent was to help minority groups feel seen and heard have been cancelled. This runs the risk of triggering pain on both individual and collective levels. As my story shows, old scripts die hard.

Then there are the leaders – the genuine allies – who care about the flourishing of their people and will feel worried about the extent to which their hands are now tied.

Find those people. Tend to them. Help them feel a bit less alone. And remind them that this too shall pass.

2. Assume positive intent

For those of us still interested in creating a more diverse, inclusive and equitable workforce, we need to get better at dialogue. That applies to those of us who agree with one another as well as those who disagree, and all shades in between.

Let’s go back to my Teams call. I could have chosen to respond to Carol as a well-meaning leader with a couple of blindspots (as opposed to, say, the devil). In service of a different sort of conversation with her I might have opened up about my own background. I could have asked her about her experience of a working world that is dominated by traditional masculine behaviour. We might have compared notes, as I also know a bit about how tough that can be. In doing so, I might have helped an FMCG company whose values evangelise belonging understand a bit more about what belonging means.

I don’t want to romanticise how such a call might have turned out. Who knows? But the point is that I didn’t have to leave the conversation feeling wounded. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t allow that to happen. Carol’s intent was likely positive, as was mine. If we can do our best to meet each other there, we won’t go far wrong.

As for those whose intent we don’t experience as being positive – well, we can still assume that they are trying to do the right thing for themselves and (perhaps) those they identify with. We can still enquire into their experience. We can still hold a space in which progress might be possible.

3. Assume nothing else

Difference takes all sorts of forms, not all of it visible. LGBTQIA+ people are an obvious example of this. So are neurodiverse populations. Then there is the more fundamental fact that all lives are unique and complex. But it is human nature to take shortcuts and assume a vast amount about others based on certain presenting characteristics. I do it all the time. You do too. 

‘Sonder’ is a wonderful word. It refers to the realisation that everyone else we encounter in life has an interior world (and a backstory) that is as rich as our own. My way of thinking about sonder is this: there is no such thing as a boring person. If I find someone boring, it is because I’m not listening hard enough. Focus on what anyone is saying for any length of time, and you’ll hear some wild stuff. And people are often carrying far more than we can imagine.

If we can take the time to try and understand something about the real human beings around us, relationships accelerate – and with that, progress. 

4. Don’t let policy dictate behaviour

Policies exist, yes, but they are merely an instrument to govern human behaviour at scale. They are an important instrument – but when the policies change or go, there is no automatic reason why behaviour should follow.

We each have choices not only about how we show up at work but also the standards to which we hold one another. If your workplace has reversed its policy around DE&I, that doesn’t mean that you have to fall back to old habits or accept others doing the same. And there are always ways and means.

For example, people are status conscious beings. That means we fear losing standing in the eyes of others. This is a powerful weapon in the fight for equality. No-one wants to feel shame in front of their peers.

5. Step up

If you’re an ally, please be one. Visibly, vocally, unequivocally – and non-performatively. We don’t just need floats at parades right now. We need real work of the thankless, relentless kind that’s often done out of sight.

Enough said.

Here is something else you don’t know about me: the notion of publishing this piece is causing me overwhelming anxiety. 

In reality, of course, there is nothing that anyone on this platform can do that will bring significant problems into my life. I will continue to be married, love my friends and family, do my best for my clients, run my businesses and so on. To be blunt, I also believe that homophobia is a reliable indicator of unresolved psychological or emotional issues. If you don’t like gay people, that is – emphatically – not my problem. 

So far, so rational. But behind that, the dominant emotion I’m experiencing is fear. At some level I wonder if that is what I will always feel, regardless of my relationships and a half a lifetime spent in recovery. The emotion lives on in my nervous system as the aftershock of the experience of my otherness and the profound sense of rejection that I have suffered in my life. That’s my burden to carry. You will have your own.

So why am I pushing myself to publish this?

Well, it’s time.

It’s time to stand up, because if not now, at this moment, when? I will not stay quiet in a context where so many minorities are feeling that the world around them is becoming more hostile. For whatever microscopic amount it’s worth: to those in my network who are feeling this stuff, I want you to know that I see you. 

As a gay man, I want you to see me too.

It is also time to come out as someone who is determined to do his bit to help work become more empathic, warm and human at a cold, hard moment in human history. As societies I believe we are better than the narrative that is being spun for us by those who assume the trappings of leadership without taking on any of its moral and ethical burdens. Real leadership is about doing what is right, whatever the cost. 

(Incidentally I had lunch with a friend a couple of weeks ago – a leader in a major construction firm – who said “nah, Phil. We are not walking back on the DE&I stuff. We’re doing even more of it”. I wanted to high five her. That is the sort of leadership we need.)

I also want to send a signal about my work to leaders and their teams. If you are feeling in any respect alone – if it feels like you can’t find a way through whatever tough times you’re experiencing – then we should talk. At heart, all business problems are human problems. There are no exceptions to this diagnosis. If this one part of my story shows anything, it’s that I’ve encountered plenty of human problems. And what’s here is just one piece of a much larger journey. But I don’t have time to write a memoir: there is work to do. Let me know if I can help.

Finally, as out of my depth as I sometimes feel on this topic, I want to say something about the DE&I agenda itself. I can only hope that it doesn’t seem naïve or simplistic. We must continue to foster dialogue, even with those who seem incapable of holding a conversation about this subject. Arguments are won by persuasion, not by belligerent rhetoric or point scoring. There is an argument to be won here, and win it we can. Ironically enough, doing so is about everyone involved realising that we are on the same side.

If sharing my story and articulating my own version of this argument makes some minuscule contribution to that outcome, then it’s worth doing.

It seems to me that the imperfect striving for a more equal, more pluralistic world is always a goal worth pursuing. By way of illustration, allow me to close on a note of hope. I have seen in my lifetime that progress is achievable, no matter how dark things might seem. When I came out, quietly, to friends and family, nearly 30 years ago, I didn’t believe that I would ever marry. Then that became possible, and life got better. There is always a world in which somewhere, somehow, we belong.

*While the story is (regrettably) true, the names are false.

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