the reality of the reality
A month or two ago I volunteered to write a piece for the bank I work for on the Aging GLBT community. Being a fan of editorial writing, I pulled a pretty damn good piece together that I hoped would both educate and inspire the readers to actually do something about their future as they grow older.
Today I received an e-mail from the editors asking me to de-editorialize it because the bank wouldn’t want to consider themselves to take a stance on any of the particular issues I raised. They were concerned my piece would make readers feel uncomfortable as well, and that I should subdue the emotional charge of the piece.
Needless to say, I scrapped the project with them and politely withdrew my entry from the publication.
The thing that gets me is that the people organizing this newsletter obviously aren’t interested in doing much with it. If they only want to tell pretty, sanitized stories that don’t have any emotional charge to them, what, I ask you dear readers, is the point? Why even have a queer publication in a MAJOR corporate that consistently ranks at the top of the lists of various GLBT agencies as one of the better places to work if the articles aren’t going to get someone’s emotions up?
Pointless.
One of the biggest things we need to do as queers is to walk head-on into the sphere of the queer world and be confrontational. Notice I didn’t say straight world. I said queer world. So many people are living their privileged queer corporate lives that they loose sight of the future and the community around them.
You should hear the idle pratter they spew on the corporate queer chat. It is disgusting.
Yet folks want to come together to produce a newsletter that would best serve the group, but can’t take a little in-your-face about an issue as serious as aging?
Pathetic.
The reality is that the bank isn’t prepared to do what it needs to do to serve MY community. And you know what, that is fine. I don’t need them to. I don’t need my bank to look out for the good of the GLBT community because I am looking out for the good of the GLBT community in many of the things I do. I OWN my actions and my participation in my community and I take part.
I thought my bank was better because they have a queer group. How wrong I was. How absolutely, positively, wrong.
I’ll post the essay here shortly.