College Confessional: Straight in a Gay World

Em and Lo


Our intern Colin Adamo writes about coming out to his coworkers at Stonewall in the U.K. as straight:

Even today when, in a comically antiquated way, we refer to learning about sex we talk about "the birds and the bees." The assumption is that we're going to be talking about boys and girls. No salaciously educational bee-on-bee action, and never any heart-warming bird-bird romance. Most of our culture today seems to take heterosexuality for granted. And I and my fellow heterosexuals walk about our daily lives hardly giving a second thought to our sexual orientation (besides the occasional lusty glance at someone while walking down the road).

This was the case for me until I came to Stonewall. After a lot of applications, crossed fingers, penny-pinching, and incorporating new words into my lexicon like "rubbish" and "bloke," I landed a summer internship through my university at Stonewall, a lesbian, gay and bisexual lobbyist group in the U.K. They're doing a bit better in terms of gay rights over here (civil partnership, gays in the military, equal adoption rights) and I figured there'd be enough an American boy could learn in a summer to make up for the atrocious dollar-to-pound exchange rate.

Despite classes in gay & lesbian history and bisexual best friends, I'd never really been in an environment before where heterosexuals were in the minority and in which nobody knew that I was one of them. There hadn't been an interview process or anything. They'd simply taken a long, hard look at my CV and I was afraid my heterosexuality might make them weary of my dedication to the cause.

Quickly, and rather naively, I found myself living out every trope of a closeted gay...

When preparing a mailing with a room full of guys we had playful chats about boyfriends. Amidst a lull in the conviviality one of my colleagues asks, "Are you seeing anyone?" I fumbled for words before finally blurting out that we'd broken up before summer break, leaving the other half of the "we" completely genderless. I stumbled again not long after that, during the first of many nights out to celebrate another Stonewall accomplishment in a nearby pub. In our revelry I let the word "ex-girlfriend" slip like a left-over piece of food that shoots from your mouth and lands awkwardly in the middle of the table. I cringed and did all but take it back to conceal my (hetero)sexual history.

It wasn't really holding me back from having a wonderful time at work. Working in any field alongside interesting people who are all passionate about a worthy cause is elating in and of itself. And in the past few weeks I've had the opportunity to party on the roof deck of London's City Hall, drink Pimms with the head of the U.K. and European branch of IBM, and march in stride alongside Sir Ian McKellen in the Pride parade (Ian is one of our founders and shows a lot of support for the organization by showing up and generally being the coolest person anyone in the room has ever met). But still, obfuscating my orientation was a bit of a monkey on my back.

After bottomless bottles of wine one night while schmoozing with our board of trustees, one co-worker asked rather nonchalantly, "What is your orientation?" After a moment of apprehensive thought I came right out and said it. "Oh, I'm straight." It was like experiencing every coming out story I'd ever heard in this alternate universe of homonormativity. Someone said, "Oh, I thought so! Not that there's anything wrong with that." Another chimed in, "Right, this doesn't change the way we feel about you." Someone else expressed their surprise because of how well dressed I was. The whole ordeal was hilarious, relieving, and incredibly unique.

Stonewall just recently launched a report about how being out in the workplace can help employees be more productive, and as one of the straight members of the staff here I feel like a poster child for this research. I'm getting paid zilch but am eager to show up early, stay late, and take on any additional work the different departments pile on, all because the workplace is so open and accepting. But what it's really made me consider is how often the way we go about our daily business tends to exclude, even if unintentionally, a significant number of people who don't fit our opposite-sex-oriented framework.

The lesson for me from this summer, however, is that it's not just the workplace we need to make more gay-friendly, but all of our social environments--even if it's as simple as asking about someone's "partner" rather than boyfriend/girlfriend and completely eliminating "gay" as a negative adjective from your vocabulary. It's quite an undeserved burden to feel as though you have to conceal your sexuality in a world where everyone else has their's proudly on display. Walking a mile in someone else's John Lobbs has made that easier for me to understand.

--by Colin Adamo


Check out Glamour's 16 sexy, sneaky acts of seduction to get him into the mood!

MORE FROM DAILY BEDPOST AND GLAMOUR: