Careers: Come Out. Move Up?

As corporate policies have become more gay-friendly, more executives are being supported by their companies in their decision to come out. Says Daryl Herrschaft, who is in charge of workplace issues at the Human Rights Campaign: "What we've been seeing is a very real acknowledgment from businesses that allowing diversity in all of its forms to flourish ... is the right thing to do, not because it feels good but because it's going to make them money." But, cautions Herrschaft, that reaction is far from universal. "We have a lot of anecdotal evidence that it is still not safe for gay or lesbian executives to be open about who they are." Employers in 33 states are free to fire people for being gay.

Sexual orientation influences your paycheck too, says Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. "Gay men in particular have earnings similar to other men, but partnered gay men have earnings quite substantially below men who partner with women." Gates has a theory about the disparity: "Being gay has impact, particularly on the executive level. You can't go to the golf club with your wife. Your wife can't entertain the spouses."

For lesbians, the story is somewhat different. "They still don't do as well as men, but lesbians tend to do better than women with male partners," says Gates. "They are less likely to have children and are in the labor force more consistently."

For Cynthia Martin, coming out didn't stand in the way of a financial boon. "I was given a very substantial promotion after that," she says. Martin went from a high-profile job at Kodak as the chief aide to the CEO to president of global customer service and support, supervising more than 3,000 people worldwide. "Coming out was really frightening, to be honest," she admits. "I had never done anything like that in my life." She feared that her credibility with colleagues would suffer. Martin, now the vice president of corporate marketing for Blue Shield of California, says the reaction from her Kodak staff was "very, very positive and kind. One woman said that I was the first lesbian she had ever met. We worked on it, and it turned out fine."

Even when the transition isn't smooth, money is a great equalizer, says Mitchell Gold, a co-owner of Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, a furniture manufacturer with revenues of more than $100 million a year. Both owners are gay, and although the factory is located in Taylorsville, N.C., a small, conservative city ("there are 14 traffic lights and 135 churches," jokes Gold), there has been little friction with employees. It's not a mystery to Gold: "We pay better than anyone [else] in the area, with better benefits." There have been small problems along the way, says Gold. "There have definitely been times that I've heard about when people haven't come to work for our company because we are gay." A self-described "redneck" once called Gold "faggot" after he was fired, but overall, Gold has 18 years of business success to crow over. "I've heard from a lot of people that there's a lot of tolerance because of economics."