Cheese Sandwiches and Sperm Donors
Being out and proud out isn’t a single gesture. It’s a gradual process. A process that isn’t purely about who knows — friends, relatives, colleagues — but how openly you articulate the full range of your experiences as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
Both my business partner and I are gay. For a good while, Be The Fox was mainly the two of us and occasional freelancers. That meant it was typical for us to pause over a cheese sandwich lunch to discuss where we could safely travel on holiday with our partners, sperm donors…becoming legal parents of our own children. As the company has grown, this same level of openness has continued. Of course everyone has an opinion about what is appropriate to share at work, however recently it has become apparent to me how liberating it is to be able to express it all, and how grateful I am to be able to be absolutely, fully, 100 percent ‘out’ at work.
Because there are aspects of being gay that hurt. For example my wife is German, and family law in Germany means that we are still in the process of jumping through very complicated legal hoops, and until we do she is not officially ‘mother’ to our son when in her home country. (Here in the UK, from the point that finally chosen sperm made it to being an embryo, we have been equal parents with equal rights.) If our son was to have an accident in Germany, my wife couldn’t make a decision on his behalf in the hospital. This hurts. And last week something came up and I could tell my colleagues about this and they listened and understood and I was glad I was able to share. And I like to think they were glad to learn. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, but they did! And now I am telling you the entirety of this story so perhaps a few of you can learn out there too. But most importantly, I get to be out a little bit more, and that openness of my identity make me a little bit happier. (There are studies on this and everything.)
We spend a whole load of time at work! Being able to reveal the entirety of our identity, whether this is to do with sexuality and gender identity or something else altogether is incredibly important. It’s a personal choice, what you reveal and what you don’t, but creating an environment where there is a default position of acceptance will change it up for everyone.
At Be The Fox we don’t always get it right, and whilst we have some understanding around identity, it is defined by our perspective. But we will continue to be out for the sake of all our communities, LGBTQ+ and otherwise.
