British Business Seeks Gay Talent

Homosexuals are being courted by employers, even by the domestic intelligence service

By Jerome Taylor

When Angela Mason began her 10-year directorship of the Stonewall gay lobby group in 1992, she had a friend in the corporate world who had two phones in his house. One he used to take personal calls for him and his partner. The other was for the office. When it came to being out and proud in the workplace, few and far between was the employee who would happily step out of the closet and declare: "I'm gay, let's do business."

"People used to genuinely fear that they would lose their jobs if they were outed, and many did," Mason remembers. "If you were found out it was absolutely the end."

It was with some sense of satisfaction, therefore, that Ms Mason read the news this week that MI5 was finally going to step out of the closet itself and begin openly recruiting people from within the gay community.

One of the last bastions of the British establishment, a place that, until the early 1990s, had actually banned hiring gays because of fears that outed spies could be blackmailed, had finally capitulated and realised that if you want to hire the best talent, you have to look at all sections of society. The days of the Oxbridge don giving white, male graduates a tap on the shoulder and a nod towards Thames House were truly over.

The domestic intelligence service is now not only going to start actively employing openly gay recruits, it is also hiring Stonewall (a group once associated with, and run by, former radicals such as Ms Mason) to advise the security services on how to encourage its spies to be more open about their sexuality and how to persuade more gay applicants to apply for jobs there.

But as dramatic as MI5's announcement seems, it is part of a much wider silent revolution that Stonewall has been pursuing for much of the past decade — persuading the corporate world to love gays. And in the past few years it finally seems to be working.

In the late 1970s, Ms Mason, a young member of the anarchist Angry Brigades group, was tried and acquitted for planting bombs on the doorsteps of Conservative politicians. She divorced in the 1980s to live with her lesbian lover and, by 1992, had been appointed director of Stonewall.

With such an anti-establishment figure heading Britain's foremost gay lobby group, Stonewall might have been expected to continue with the sort of tactics that had made its new director so notorious. Instead, Ms Mason, and Ben Summerskill, her successor as chief executive, did something far more radical — they took Stonewall mainstream and began charming, rather than confronting, the corporate world.

The outcome of that tactic is that MI5 has now joined more than 430 companies, representing more than four million employees, who have signed up to Stonewall's list of "gay-friendly employers". Those on the list actively recruit gay people and monitor the sexual orientation of their staff to ensure against silent discrimination.

Many encourage their gay and lesbian staff to take part in Pride events as well as supporting the events financially. They are also expected to have clear and publicised policies for dealing with cases of sexual discrimination and encourage the promotion of openly gay staff on to the board or senior management team.

With 15,000 gay students leaving university every year and an estimated 1.7 million gay men and women of working age, Stonewall began persuading companies that discriminating against gay employees was simply bad for business.

The corporate world began to see sense. Where once people were fired for their sexual orientation, major corporations now jostle with each other to prove their equalitarian credentials.

To provide an incentive, Stonewall began producing an annual list of "top gay employers". Local authorities, charities and the voluntary sector all scored well but, every year, more and more mainstream corporations began appearing on the list.