Lord Browne - Internalized Homophobia at the Highest Levels

For me, a major part of the "coming out" process was letting go of all of the religious and societal brainwashing that I had grown up with that made me perceive being gay as something simply too horrible to contemplate.  Hence the decades of mental gymnastics to convince myself "it wasn't really true" and living constantly on guard and behind a glass wall, if you will, so that no one might discover my terrible secret.  I suffered from internalized homophobia of the highest order.  And it took several years of therapy to get over the damage that had been done to me emotionally and psychologically.  For many of us older gays, the homophobia that we internalized made coming out so, so difficult and painful.  Indeed, I have gay friends who still cannot completely let go of the homophobia they internalized in their youth.  A lengthy article in The Guardian looks at Lord Browne (pictured above), former head of British Petroleum who similarly had to overcome this kind of toxic internalized homophobia.  Browne has now written a book, The Glass Closet, that looks at Browne's experience and why he believes continued homophobia in the business world undermines business productivity. Here are article highlights:

When Lord Browne was in charge of BP, had anyone told him he would one day invite a journalist into his home to discuss his sexuality, he would have said they were insane. Homosexuality was the last thing he expected to talk about in public; after all, he never spoke of it even in private. The former CEO spent half a century in the closet, so terrified of letting his secret slip that he never talked about himself at all, confining his conversational repertoire instead to "the news, and politics, and business. That's what you'd talk about."

But since a Sunday tabloid outed him seven years ago, his life has become a series of unimaginable surprises. For Browne, the revelation has been how much less homophobic the world is than he had always feared. He has now written a book about homosexuality within the business world, and the revelation for many readers will be how homophobic that world still is.

The Glass Closet tells the story of Browne's 38-year career and double life, which began when he joined BP in 1969, and ended with a single phone call from the Mail on Sunday in January 2007, informing him that it was about to publish a kiss'n'tell by a former Brazilian escort, Jeff Chevalier. He had been Browne's first and only boyfriend; the pair met in 2003 on a gay escort website and were together for almost three years. But in public, Browne was a heterosexual bachelor.

His reason for writing The Glass Closet is, he says, quite simple. "I wouldn't want anyone else to go through what I went through."

This motivation to spare others is common among victims of injustice who become campaigners, but it's about the only thing Browne has in common with a typical activist. He lives in a town house on Cheyne Row in Chelsea, where a butler leads me through rooms that could pass for an art gallery and out across a courtyard to a private library purpose-built to hold his antique book collection. A chauffeur-driven Bentley is waiting to whisk him off to the launch of a Matisse exhibition when we have finished.

Browne knew he was gay by the time he left boarding school, and didn't tell a soul. His mother, a Roma Jew, was an Auschwitz survivor and passed to her son an abiding fear that to be different was to invite persecution. "I internalised that to mean being gay was basically wrong, because if you got caught it would be very dangerous."

In Browne's mind, there was no choice. He had to keep his sexuality secret, or his career would be over. "You had to blend in, be chameleon-like, so no one would notice your private life. But you could be noticed in your work life, so you sublimated a lot into that. 

Early in his career, he thought perhaps he could quietly come out once he was further up the ladder. But the higher he climbed, the bigger his public profile grew. In 1995 BP was just a struggling national company, but its new CEO launched a series of audacious takeovers and mergers that turned it into the second largest oil corporation on the planet. Browne became known as "the Sun King", described as Britain's most successful businessman, and almost certainly its most highly paid. 

His devotion to the job left little time for friends. His father, an army officer, had died in 1980; an only child, he was overwhelmed by loneliness when his mother died in 2000. For the first time in his life, aged 52, he risked a relationship with a man.

To anyone of Browne's generation, what happened next may be perfectly recognisable. To anyone under 25, it will sound incomprehensible. When Browne fell in love with Chevalier, he didn't announce their relationship, nor even acknowledge it to his closest friends. The words, "I am gay" had passed his lips only twice in his life, and when Chevalier moved in, Browne didn't even mention his new domestic arrangement to his butler.

Browne thought he was being careful, but now sees it differently. "A friend said, 'Well, of course what you were really doing was daring people to pull you out, and you didn't know you were, but you shouldn't have been surprised when it happened.' And I think, now, that probably the time was coming when what I was doing, and who I was, was becoming unsustainable."  It never occurred to him that Chevalier might betray him.

Seven years on, he still looks stunned by the avalanche of supportive letters and emails that came pouring in, his first intimation that the world might not mind him being gay after all: "It was just amazing." Friends, former colleagues, politicians, journalists and strangers offered support and advice;  . . . .  One of the many strangers who wrote to him was a 32-year-old Vietnamese banker. They met for a drink, fell in love, and have been together since. For the very first time, Browne is one half of a public gay couple.

[T]he simple act of coming out has made him feel like a completely different person.  "The transformation was quite extraordinary for me, because I had to confront who I was, and talk about who I was. I'd never done that before – I always talked about myself just as someone who represented a business. And now I have changed."

Had Browne's story been unique, he would not have written the book. But the statistics indicated to him that the corporate closet must be crowded. British attitudes towards homosexuality have undergone such a sea change in the past 15 years that in many professions – politics, the media – inclusivity is now taken for granted. The less widely reported, more troubling story Browne decided to tell is how little the corporate world has changed.

Only half of all LGBT employees in the US are estimated to be out at work, and in this country a third are estimated to be in the closet.

[I]t is industry leaders who, he hopes, will read his book. He was taken aback by the culture of fear and prejudice he uncovered. Interviewees were offered a guarantee of anonymity, and even then closeted businessmen and women told him they were too frightened to talk.

Homophobia isn't just a problem for gay employees, Browne argues – it's a problem for business. He doesn't concern himself with appeals to morality or equality, but instead keeps hammering home his unshakable conviction that firms that allow their staff to be open and honest are more profitable than companies that make gay employees live a lie. Browne used to think he was doing BP a service by staying in the closet. It was only after he came out that he realised what a colossal waste of energy it had been, and how much more of himself could have been devoted to BP had he been able to be open.

In the book, he quotes a gay businesswoman making the case for introducing a non-discrimination policy to cover sexual orientation. "I want you to go back to your offices," she told her heterosexual bosses. "I want you to remove all vestiges of your family, particularly your spouse. Put the pictures in the drawer and take off your wedding band. You cannot talk about your family, and where you were on vacation. And if your spouse or partner is seriously ill, you are afraid to acknowledge the relationship, because you are afraid you might lose your job. Do all of that – and see how productive you are."

The classic mistake, he says, is to devolve responsibility to an HR department. "HR managers are not CEOs; they're not there to set the tone; the tone has to come from the very top." It's no use simply saying their business is gay-friendly. Chief executives need to give speeches about inclusion, make the diversity officer's role an executive one, create LGBT resource groups and run "allies' programmes", where heterosexual employees sign up to support colleagues who want to come out.

The key, he argues, is to make it easy for gay employees to come out at the beginning of their careers.

I agree with Browne completely on the issue of lost productivity.  Being in the closet at work is exhausting and all the energy and effort expended hiding one's "secret" can be far better used to further the business' interests.