The Thundering Silence of a Straight Ally
By Michael Boyajian
The New York Times recently produced an investigative report on how gay cadets were living a lie at West Point denying their sexuality for the sake of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Straight allies have also been forced to live a similar lie no less devastating. Case in point, when I was in publishing I hired a new editor. He was from a good sized New Jersey newspaper and he had good credentials just what we needed to lift our magazine back to its former glory. It never occurred to me nor did I care that he might be gay. He had excellent credentials.
Sometime after he had been working for a while I was in a group executive meeting when the discussion turned abruptly to my editor. Off the cuff I was asked if the editor was gay. I was not aksed by words but by a hand movement. I quickly replied no, no he is a very dedicated hard working editor and will help turn the publication around and lift us to profitability. They liked the word profit and so I had covered both our tracks and probably saved both our jobs.
Sometime later they closed down our magazine and reassigned our staff to other publications. My editor was down the corridor from me on another magazine from me. One day his publisher was berating him quite loudly for no reason and it disturbed me knowing the kind of worker the editor was so I asked a colleague why he was being treated this way and I was told the publisher thinks he’s gay and he doesn’t like gays. I had to sit there like a coward as my friend and former editor was chewed out without just cause. It left a mark on me so much so that I decided to become a lawyer and protect the rights of myself and others.
After law school I got involved with the Brooklyn Republicans a fairly moderate group. It was before the rampant homophobia of George W. Bush and word came from up the line of command that we were to outreach to gays in the name of the Open Tent which I duly did garnering support from the LGBT community for my state assembly race and the political club I helped to co-found. My campaign lived and breathed with the Young Republicans and the gay Republicans, the Log Cabin Club. After a while the lines became blurred. YRs were Log Cabiners and vice versa only the YRs were deep in the closet.
Our LGBT support became such that leaders began to wonder if I was gay and so I was given a metaphoric talking to how when you put paper in the wrong slot of a copy machine it does not work sort of like what the leader of the Log Cabin was doing with his partner and did I understand all of this. I said yes and walked away from the meeting shocked though I continued to garner LGBT support. Ultimately we lost our race being outnumbered by Democrats 7 to 1 but we did better than any Republican before or after our race and I became something of hero in the party.
I continued my work with the YRs and Log Cabiners helping them all out in return for the help they had given me. Surprisingly the same people who had given me the photocopy talk elevated me to consideration for a position as a state human rights judge. I got the job but only because of the support of the closeted YRs and Log Cabin Republicans who all had influence with the governor’s appointment office.
Then came 9/11 and the twisted Iraq War and the attacks by the Bush Administration on the LGBT community. I realized that it was all a lie and once again became a Democrat only secretly until the Republican governor left office and then I changed my enrollment officially. I had feared for my job up till then.
Around 2005 I was looking for a way to put something back into the planet for all my good fortune when a fellow Freemason, YR and Log Cabin man called and asked me to help Marriage Equality New York. I believed in the cause and immediately joined up and became such a help that their leadership elevated me to Straight Outreach Coordinator among other things. I had exited my straight ally closet.
Why did I write this? Perhaps because I have grown tired of trying to explain why I help with the marriage equality movement to people who are suspicious of the LGBT community. There are also other reasons, my work helps when my memory recalls my inaction as my friend and editor was verbally abused. But it is also because I believe that it takes a village to raise an adult and a village raised me and now I help that village to raise others all in the name of love and equality.
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