Careers: Come Out. Move Up?

Tim Kincaid, an analyst at American Airlines, was tired of hearing about the wedding plans of the woman in the next cubicle. "You would have thought it was the Von Trapp wedding from The Sound of Music," he recalls. But it rankled for reasons other than gossip overload. Kincaid was a closeted gay man, living under a "self-imposed silence. My assumption was, 'Don't ask, don't tell.'" Although he was openly gay in the rest of his life, he was afraid to let anyone in hisoffice know. "I had worked a long time to get to this dream job," he says. "I thought, Do I want to risk it? I was really unsure of the atmosphere." But Kincaid finally felt that he needed to come out to his boss. "I went in and said, 'I need to tell you something: I'm gay.' He was a busy guy, and multitasking while we were talking. But he noticeably focused on me and listened. It was a powerful moment."

Kincaid is now American Airline's manager of corporate communications, living what he describes as a "more authentic life. I'm bringing my whole self to work. I'm not spending any energy hiding or shape shifting into something I'm not. What they see is what they get." It's a transition that more executives are choosing to make.

Gay managers work differently than straight managers, and they may be better in some respects, says University of Southern California teacher and researcher Kirk Snyder, author of The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives Are Excelling as Leaders...and What Every Manager Needs to Know (Jossey-Bass). Snyder who personally interviewed 150 gay male executives who have come out in the workplace, the largest study of its kind. His theory is that such gay corporate leaders show higher levels of seven desirable management skills, such as creativity, intuition and collaboration.

The cornerstone of Snyder's findings and the message of gay business advocates is that gay workers should be willing to come out. Says Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications, a marketing and public relations firm in Washington that specializes in the gay market: "The sea change that he reflects is that he found enough openly gay managers to study."

Snyder and many other gay executives and leaders (all the people quoted in this article are openly gay) believe those superior skills are born of the challenges that gays must overcome. Says Snyder: "It wasn't as though gay executives all said, 'Oh, let's go to Fire Island [a beach resort in New York with a substantial gay enclave] this weekend and decide what kind of managers we should be.' This emerged independently of any kind of organized effort. It's the experience of being gay in a straight world that has manifested itself in these characteristics when you get in the workplace."

As rancorous as the debate over gay marriage has become, gay executives are increasingly being welcomed in corporate America, which is to say that they are as hassled as all the other wage slaves. According to State of the Workplace 2006, a new study by the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, a majority of FORTUNE 500 companies--254--now offer health benefits to domestic partners.