Money Angles

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.