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My family just after our daughter’s birth in 2004. We were building a family out of love, but as legal strangers. When I was pregnant, we were not yet able to legally marry, so our health insurance benefits remained complicated (and also taxable, unlike for other colleagues). When we became domestic partners, she lost a job and did not have health insurance and I was unable to offer spousal coverage. When I first started a career many years ago at a range of otherwise progressive tech companies, I was not able to legally marry my partner of several years. People may genuinely be seeking answers to such questions, and they might be unaware of and surprised to hear that inside of corporations around the world there remain issues of workplace inclusion and equality, safety, and legal protections and benefits related to family rights. Shouldn’t that remain private? Shouldn’t employers stay away from “political issues,” and meanwhile wouldn’t it be a bad example for employers to set to support such “lifestyles?”
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Occasionally there have been times, mostly far in the past, when colleagues wondered aloud why anyone should talk about that kind of thing at work and what that has to do with the workplace. And sometimes people are in fact uncomfortable with the idea of being, or working with, LGBTQ people, or talking about being gay, bi, or transgender in general. I’m fairly out at work, have a lovely wife and a lovely teenage daughter, was lead of USA – SAP’s LGBTQ employee network – for six years, manage SAP’s relationship with the awesome Lesbians Who Tech crew, and have fought for our right to be legally married ever since I was pregnant in 2004.īut I don’t like to make anyone uncomfortable, so I don’t always talk about being gay or about my family. You might also know that I’m not really a flag-waving person, at least in order to call attention to myself, and I’m actually pretty claustrophobic in parades. If you know me, you probably know that I’m gay.