Out and Equal in the 90s

I just ran across Nicole Raeburn's Changing Corporate America from Inside Out: Lesbian and Gay Workplace Rights. I was happy to see that two events I was involved with were credited in moving forward LGBT rights in the workplace.

In 1991, I was a panel speaker at the first Out and Equal Workplace Issues Conference in San Francisco, and the following year I served on the steering committee for the event. From Raeburn's book:

Also in the fall of 1991, but on the opposite coast, members of several gay employee networks in northern California organized the first annual Out and Equal in the 90s workplace conference. The brainchild of employee activists from major corporations in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area, this event likewise issued a resounding call for workplace activisim. Held at San Francisco City College in October 1991, the first Out and Equal conference was a daylong affair that drew over 150 attendees from approximately thirty companies (Bain 1992c).

The event prompted several lesbian and gay employee activists in the San Francisco Bay area to organize an informal intercorporate network, which in 1992 became "formally constituted as an arm of NGLTF (the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) and the nucleus of the NGLTF Work Place Initiative...."

Reflecting both the rapidly expanding ranks of the workplace movement and the networking success of the Bay Area's intercorporate umbrella group, San Francisco's 1992 gay and lesbian Freedom Day Parade included a sizable number of gay employee networks. The "corporate contingent" of the march was 250 people strong, representing approximately sixty companies both within and outside of the Fortune 1000 (Bain 1992a). This sudden and highly visible increase in the number of workplace activists reveals the profound impact that the 1991 Out and Equal conference had on the movement.

Indeed, that first Out and Equal conference was considered such a success that it soon garnered the financial support and organizational resources of the larger gay rights movement and powerful players in the university and corporate sectors. In both 1992 and 1993, NGLTF cosponsored the conference with Stanford University (Bain 1992c). The 1992 conference, a two-day event held on Stanford's campus, was attended by 330 people from some ninety organizations, mostly corporations.

Coincidentally, I just unpacked my photo albums the other day and ran across a picture of Oracle's contingent in the 1992 parade mentioned above. I also found a copy of the email I sent in July of 1989 organizing the first gay and lesbian lunch at Oracle. Less than a year later, Oracle marched in the SF Pride Parade for the first time. We were also one of the founding members of the "intercorporate umbrella group" that Raeburn mentioned.

We've come a long way, baby. But there's still a ways to go...