This week, PGN is recognizing openly gay leaders who have influence and power in the Philadelphia region. While the LGBT community often honors leaders within the community, we don’t often take time to recognize those in positions of power and responsibility in mainstream organizations, be they at corporations, nonprofits or government agencies.
For this list, we set a few parameters for inclusion. We looked at job titles and level in the organization, budget, number of staff managed and ability to influence or impact public citizens through policies or programs. We excluded people who had been with their organizations for less than a year. (Recent promotions, we’ll be looking at you for next year.)
This list is neither exhaustive nor complete: We did not reach as widely as we’d hoped across race and ethnicity, nor across industries where we might have expected to see more out individuals. Some specific examples include Asian Americans, African-American women and leaders in the pharmaceutical industry. This list also doesn’t include anyone who self-identified as bisexual or transgender.
And while this list demonstrates the breadth and depth of influence and impact that the LGBT community has, both in Philadelphia and corporations based here, assembling it also highlighted that there are still some who are not comfortable being included on such a list — individuals who may be privately out but not publicly out.
In one instance, PGN contacted an individual that more than one person suggested for inclusion and, to our chagrin, discovered that the person was not out at work, and who felt that being on the list could hinder the access, influence and impact the person has. In this case, that’s likely true: There are still professions where it’s hard to be openly gay — even in Philadelphia, where nondiscrimination protections have been law for 25 years.
In another incident this week, a newspaper named a high-ranking official at a city office as a victim of an alleged hate crime, in what appears to be an effort to criticize the person’s boss.
For someone who was quietly out, this had the effect of repeating the alleged hate crime and magnifying it. It’s one thing to have sexually explicit language written about you and your partner on a bathroom wall in your workplace; it’s quite another to have that language published verbatim in a paper with a circulation of 100,000.
This incident highlights a few areas where there is homophobia and/or a lack of sensitivity for a minority that the Attorney General concluded deserves “heightened scrutiny” with consideration to law. First, there’s the perpetrator of the alleged hate crimes (there was more than one act). Second, there’s the apparent assumption by the reporter that it’s OK to identify the alleged victim. Media outlets generally have a code of ethics about withholding names of victims, particularly in cases of sexual assault or hate crimes. That this reporter (and editor) chose to identify the person shows a lack of sensitivity around the issue. While this person might have a position of power and influence, that does not exempt him from being a target for bullying, intimidation and harassment. That the person was singled out because of his sexual orientation compounds the damage; the reporter’s efforts to casually dismiss his own insensitivity is an attempt to dismiss the damage as inconsequential. It’s not.