A long time ago, in my first week at the sort of organisation that has a corporate box at the opera, I was asked if I would bring myself and my wife to it. I am northern. I am queer. I had not been to the opera. I did not have a wife. What I said was of course.
I had to get myself out of it. I do not now remember the words I used. I remember that they were not the right ones. What stayed with me was not the opera. It was that nobody had thought to ask. The wife was assumed. The opera was assumed. The kind of person who would want both was assumed. I was, in my first week, being measured against a template I did not fit, and it had not crossed anyone’s mind that I might not.
The calculation that does not go away
What I had been doing in that moment, and what I have continued to do in different forms ever since, was the calculation. The quick, half-conscious assessment of who is in the room, what is acceptable to say here, what version of myself can be safely shown. The calculation does not go away when you come out. It does not go away when you become senior. It does not go away when the organisation puts a rainbow on its email signatures every June. It runs in the background of every new conversation. The variables shift. The mechanism does not.
Alongside my work as a therapist, I have worked, and sometimes still work, as a chief people officer. I have sat at the top of the structures that are supposed to make these calculations unnecessary. I still did them. I still pause, mid-sentence, when I am about to use the word husband. I still notice the small moment in which I am deciding what to say about my weekend to a new colleague. The calculation has the speed of a habit at this point. It does not feel like a decision. It feels like breathing.
The clients I see in therapy describe versions of the same thing. People who have been out for ten or twenty years. People in senior roles. People in welcoming workplaces. The calculation does not, in their accounts or in mine, go away. What changes, over the years, is what we do with the result. There was a time when it almost always produced the edited version: husband becomes partner, partner becomes nothing in particular, the weekend becomes vague. There is more, now, of the calculation producing the truer answer. But the calculation itself is still happening. Anyone who tells you it goes away after a certain number of years out, or after a certain seniority, or after the laws change, has not been doing the work I have seen many queer people do, including myself.
The labour
There is also the labour. This is the part of being out at work that most workplaces do not, in any serious sense, see. It is not the labour of doing your job. It is the labour of being in your job as yourself.
The clients I see name it in different ways. The small editing of weekends. The angled-out-of-frame wedding photo on a video call. The slight pause before saying partner or husband or wife. The careful, neutral we when describing a holiday. The decision, every time you start somewhere new, about when and how to come out, which is itself a labour even when the answer is right away.
And there is the question of who you bring. Anyone who has worked in a conservative sector knows this. The summer drinks. The Christmas party. The client dinner where partners are invited. Each of these involves a small piece of work that the straight colleagues are not doing. Will this person be acceptable here. Will I be acceptable here once they have seen me with this person. Will this colleague’s wife, whom I have just met, be all right with my husband. Will the introduction be smooth or will there be a small flicker that I will then have to pretend I did not see.
None of this appears on the appraisal. None of it is paid for. It accumulates, and it is one of the things that makes being queer at work, even in a workplace one likes, more tiring than the same work would be for someone for whom none of these calculations apply.
The glossed-over truth
The hardest version of all of this, and one of the most common things I hear about in the consulting room, is the lie that has already been told. The small thing, three years ago, that you let stand because the moment was not right. The colleague who has been calling your husband your partner because you did not correct her the first time and now it would be strange to. The senior who thinks you are unmarried because you said you were, and the divorce you implied was behind you, and the no kids you said in a way that did not invite questions. The small fictions that were easier than the truth at the time, and that have, over the months and the years, hardened into the version of you that is on file.
This is, I think, the bit no one talks about. The everyday queer experience at work is not really one decision about coming out. It is the slow accumulation of small dishonesties, most of them committed under conditions of mild duress, none of them dramatic, all of them adding up to a version of you that is not really you. And the more senior you get, the more these accumulated edits become part of how you are known.
What is at stake here is not just being out. It is being known. You can be out, in the technical sense, and still have allowed enough small distortions to accrete around you that the colleagues who think they know you are, in fact, knowing a slightly fictional character.
How you get out of it
What I have found, working with clients on this, is that there is no clean way. The conversation in which you sit down with a colleague and announce that you are not, in fact, divorced, that there is no ex-wife, that the children you implied do not exist, is not a conversation most people are going to have. It would make you look slightly mad. It would make you look as if you had been lying for years, which is, in a small way, what you have been doing, but the framing would not be helpful.
What seems to work, in my experience as a therapist, is something gentler. You start, from a particular point, being slightly more truthful. The next time the husband comes up in conversation, you call him a husband. The next time a colleague says something about your past that is based on the small fictions, you correct it lightly, without making it a thing. You let the gloss continue to be the gloss in the colleagues’ memories, and you let the present-tense version of you, going forward, be the truer one. Over time, the gloss falls away, not through confrontation, but through being no longer fed.
This is not satisfying. There is no clean moment of having put it right. But it is, in most cases, the only available move. The clients I have seen do this report that the people who matter tend to notice the shift without needing you to explain it. They had probably suspected for some time that the official version was incomplete. The new version is a quiet relief on their end too.
A small last thing
When I think about the opera moment now, what strikes me is not the embarrassment, although the embarrassment was real. It is that the small lie I told in that moment was not really mine. It was the lie the room had constructed for me before I walked in. I just said of course to it.
That is the work, I think. Noticing what lie the room is constructing, before you walk into it. Choosing what part of it to absorb and what part to push back on. Not every workplace is safe enough to push back on every part. But fewer than we tend to assume are as unsafe as we initially calculate.
I work with LGBTQ+ and queer clients in individual, LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy, online and in person from my practices in London and Hitchin. If this reflects your own experience of coming out at work, you’re welcome to book a free 20-minute discovery call through my website.