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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 47

MONEY ANGLES

Three-Dollar Bills


By Andrew Tobias


    How times change. First we freed the slaves (good move),
then we gave women the vote (jury still out), and now we seem
to be saying gays are O.K. too. A recent FORTUNE cover story
was titled "Gay in Corporate America -- What It's Like, and How
Business Attitudes Are Changing." The Episcopal Church has
seriously considered sanctioning gay marriages. And as if that
weren't enough, Harvard Business School (Harvard Business
School!) now has a gay hot line.

    Of course, whenever such sea changes are occurring,
there's lots of controversy, sometimes even civil war. But with
time, we adapt. Racial prejudice lives on, but few Americans
today believe in slavery -- or even segregated drinking
fountains. Not every man is comfortable working for a woman, but
relatively few believe women should be denied the right to vote
-- or even the right to run a small country (Britain comes to
mind) or join the Army.

    Hatred of any type is rarely justified or productive, not
even the good old-fashioned hatred of one religious group by
another. But when an idea is young (gay lib began in 1969, after
police harassment sparked a riot in New York's Greenwich
Village), there's usually tremendous resistance. It's just the
way the world works. Even automated-teller machines took a while
to catch on. Can you imagine?

    So it's noteworthy that a mere generation after someone
got the notion it isn't right to persecute people for their
sexual orientation -- a thing no more easily changed, it turns
out, than Martin Luther King's skin or Gloria Steinem's gender
-- there is quiet recognition among a large segment of the
country, and even the conservative business world, that, hey,
most people are straight, some people are gay, and it's really
not that big a deal. Sometimes it's even pretty funny.

    One New York printing firm, run by gay women, advertises,
"We're Here, We're Queer, and We Do Quality Printing."
Obviously, most people would just as soon know as little as
possible about the sex lives of their printers. But as marketers
have increasingly discovered, there's a large, affluent gay
market, and gays like to patronize businesses where they feel
welcome.

    When I was at Harvard Business School, there wasn't a
single openly gay student. Oh, at Harvard College maybe, but
Harvard Business School? Please.

    Yet there was FORTUNE this past December reporting on
gay-employee organizations "at companies ranging from AT&T to
Xerox" and a gay corporate network in Chicago with 600 members
(nicknamed "Fruits in Suits"); the openly gay president of a
well-known ad agency, a gay Wall Street lunch club and a group
called the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists
and Technical Professionals; and on an openly gay second-year
Harvard B-school student named Jonathan Rotenberg.

    Rotenberg, 28, is a member of the Harvard Business School
Gay and Lesbian Students Association. It was founded in 1979,
around the same time, coincidentally, that Rotenberg, then 13,
founded the Boston Computer Society. (He remains its chairman.)
The Boston Computer Society -- the most influential
computer-users group in the world, with 32,000 dues-paying
members in 45 countries -- is larger than the Harvard Business
School Gay and Lesbian Students Association, but since arriving
at Harvard, Rotenberg has devoted more of his time to G.L.S.A.

    He created the G.L.S.A. Audiotext Hotline, "an automated
service designed for people of all sexual orientations:
straight, gay, bisexual and unsure." You dial up the G.L.S.A.
computer (617-495-6100) and, in total anonymity, choose from a
menu of more than 100 brief prerecorded messages -- everything
from "What causes people to be gay?" and "Can a gay person be
changed into a heterosexual?" to your choice of 12 "Common myths
about homosexuality," a directory of counseling services and the
policies of 11 different religious denominations toward gay
issues. (Now don't all call at once.)

    Last semester Rotenberg and his cohort distributed a
pamphlet to everyone on campus. "There's something a bunch of
your classmates would like to tell you," read the front cover,
continuing inside, "It's not easy being gay at Harvard Business
School." The pamphlet acknowledged that "sexual orientation is
a topic that makes many people uncomfortable" -- an
understatement on a par with original estimates for bailing out
the savings and loan industry. Yet Rotenberg says his classmates
and colleagues have been almost uniformly positive, both before
and after his appearance in FORTUNE. His hot line (not mentioned
in FORTUNE) has logged more than 1,100 calls.

    To those who are astonished that Liberace was gay (or
Alexander the Great or Leonardo da Vinci or numerous current
power people whose right to privacy should be respected), as to
those who wonder whether Ed Bradley of CBS's 60 Minutes is black
(this was actually a question some years ago in Parade: "My
husband and I can't agree: Is Ed Bradley of CBS's 60 Minutes
black?" Yes, dear, he is), these must be strange and frightening
times.

    But it looks as if yet another scaffold of prejudice is in
the early stages of dismantlement, and that's likely in the
long run to make America stronger and more competitive. If the
best man for a particular job happens to be a woman -- or gay,
or Catholic, or black -- why waste that talent? It's
inefficient. A nation whose citizens respect and get along with
one another has an advantage. Good for Harvard Business School.