An Awokening

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Why Aim for Greater Cultural Intelligence?

A series of experiences come to mind because I’ve read two articles today that make me uncomfortable -- my brilliant, openly queer friend Li Sian Goh’s essay and openly gay NYT columnist Frank Bruni’s op-ed:

An adorable Asian young man and I are talking with other lovely, mostly Asian people at the 31st birthday party of MJ Yap, my colleague and friend, several weeks ago. He tells me that he’s from Bhutan. He’s got the same complexion as many South Asian people I’ve met from India. He says, “They call me Baby. That’s my nickname.”

“There’s an amazing lesbian novel called Babyji that I loved – about a lesbian in India, who –“

“I’m not from –“

“I know you’re from Bhutan, not India, but in India, adding 'ji' to a name is an endearment –”

He doesn’t care, his expression tells me, he’s not lesbian and he’s not from India. Get me out of here, I’m thinking. I’m just trying to affiliate with this otherwise sweet guy and I’ve made a faux pas and want to disappear.

Earlier in the evening, I’m feeling awkward around three attractive Asian-American women and blurt nonsensically, “Do you ever feel invisible from an attraction standpoint because the older I get, the more invisible I feel.” One of them dignifies my comment with an answer, “No, but I do routinely have to deal with people cutting ahead of me in lines as if I’m not there. I think they think I won’t say anything.”

Which is better? For me to have avoided going to a birthday party, where I’m one of the only non-Asian and older people there or to go and make at least a couple of potentially alienating remarks? Li Sian has gently helped me see that this is not where my focus needs to be. Rather, it needs to be simply on apologizing for my microaggressions. I'll apologize here and then will also do so individually. I'm sorry for my cluelessness and will work on becoming less so.

Or what about the recent event that included a screening of “Moonlight” and a panel on the intersectionality of diversity and sexual orientation? Does it help or hurt for my gay white friend who is with me to hear one of the panelists, Andi, say that he could never call himself gay and chooses queer instead because gay is “a white men’s” term? (Scroll down for more discussion on this.)

Or how about when a friend who is visibly differently abled posts her despondency at being made fun of by strangers while walking down the street recently? And then clarifies for those of us who write outraged responses, saying that she isn’t looking for pity, just had needed to post about the indignity.

Or the heterosexual Indian friend who posts a 1995 photo of himself the other day with the caption that it was the day he was going to kill himself, but then didn’t? And then explains to friends who comment at how they wish they had known of his unhappiness and how glad they are that he is not dead, saying that he has deleted the original post because it was going in the wrong direction – that he was only trying to point out that things can be bad and then they can improve.

Or the sincere people who ask about Pat & me, “Who’s the husband?” And how I answer graciously and factually, “No one. We’re both women, so both of us are wives.”

Or the colleague when I worked in Schaumburg, Illinois, who wanted to know how I could have blue eyes since I’m Jewish? And who was thrilled when I gave her the ham I won in the company’s free, random Thanksgiving lottery? (I was not the only non-pork-eating employee there. Just ask my colleague Farooq.)

Frank Bruni’s is first, during my breakfast omelet, which Pat has made with love. The op-ed begins snidely, and even though I can tell that it is coming from hurt feelings, I can hardly stand to keep going: 

“I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice.” Of course, he’s upset. No one likes to feel excluded or silenced or that his or her opinion doesn’t matter. That same white, gay friend who came to the “Moonlight” event has explained to me similarly over the years: I’ve never known from white male privilege because since boyhood, I was routinely beaten up and made fun of and did not feel part of that club. Yet Andi's experience is no less Andi's experience.

 

I’ve written about this before: I learned what “inclusion” meant when co-facilitator Steve Basile invited me to the United Auto Workers’ Diversity Conference in the late-90s; our topic covered how to be inclusive of gay and lesbian colleagues at work.

The first night, I went to the opening reception and even after Steve arrived, I was among the only non-Black people in the cavernous hall. I said to myself then, I know what the definition of Diversity is: Environments / teams / places qualify as diverse, as long as I’m included, whoever “I” is in that statement. (Ironically, in the late-90s, LGBT seminars, including ours, unfortunately, did not routinely include education on bi and trans people.)

Li Sian’s essay also is difficult for me to read. Li Sian is writing about the racism of the novel, Jane Eyre.  Somehow, I wasn’t required to read it in high school and I’ve never done so. The essay is difficult because it also challenges privileged people who feel proud of reading books by authors from the margins, and by extension, for feeling pleased whenever they make an effort to stretch themselves beyond their social cocoon.

As a relatively well-educated, employed and solvent American-Jewish lesbian, I am more and less privileged than others. I want to be proud of the times I extend myself to gain some cultural intelligence because if I can’t celebrate my bravery and encourage myself to keep extending myself, then I just want to burrow in and stick with apparently my own people exclusively. That's my experience, and Li Sian's is hers, just as Andi's is his, and the Bhutanian's is his, and the Asian woman's from the party is hers, and my differently abled friend's is hers, and my heterosexual, Indian friend's is his, and Frank Bruni's is his, and my white gay friend's is his, and my Muslim colleague Farooq's is his and Pat & mine is ours.

After reading these articles today, I’m on high alert:

I turn to the last page of “The New York Times”, where I am annoyed by the headline and story, “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism”. Why Non-Lesbian Women Had Better Sex … is what the reporter means, I confirm by reading the article. More lesbian invisibility. Get me out of here – this is the phrase that springs to mind whether I’ve embarrassed myself through my own cultural ignorance or someone has irked me with his or hers.

What would “getting out of here” achieve, though? I prefer to transform indignities into art, whereas escaping just allows me to escape the particular situation, but the unhappy feelings come with me. Getting out of here does not foster art or connection with people. Acknowledging their experience, and my own, does.

The Journey from David's Bar Mitzvah to Lesbian [Role-]Modeling for IBM

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Reprinted from GLBT IBMers & Friends Community Blog Behind IBM's Firewall

How did I get from the dance-floor of Congregation Agudath Sholom's reception hall to becoming a lesbian "poster-child" for IBM? In response, I considered three photos from 1978, 2002 and 2010:

In the first, the girl towered over the Bar-Mitzvah boy; she was me at 13. The boy's younger sister, now married with kids, just like the boy is, shared the photo with me via Facebook last week. It arrived while I was participating in Out & Equal's Workplace Summit, where IBM won the Workplace Excellence Award. The boy was sweet, but the girl that his twin-brother danced with nearby was a classmate on whom I had a crush.

This past June, in a letter to my younger self, I described how it felt to be attending a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school while being consciously aware of my lesbianism from age 11 onward. Paradoxically, I think that my years at that school were what motivated me to help represent IBM's GLBT Community so visibly; at our 8th grade graduation ceremony, I recall our principal, giving each of us a copy of *Pirkei Avoth* (*Ethics of the Fathers*) and telling us that he knew we would be among the leaders of our communities -- he was referring to Jewish communities, but I think I must have subconsciously taken it as a call to community leadership altogether.

Ten years after realizing my lesbian identity, I came out explicitly to my family and gained community leadership skills while living in Chicago; I volunteered as a GLBTQ youth group advisor and also co-anchored "The 10% Show," which was produced by the Chicago bureau of the Gay Cable Network (which no longer exists, unfortunately). These experiences were tremendously confidence-building, and profound; the youth group enabled me to help youth feel better along the way about who they were, and to speed through some of the same angst I had had, growing up, and the cable TV show taught me that I was part of a rich culture. Till then, I'd really only been taught to see the richness of Jewish culture. It was my gay community experience in Chicago that sewed the seeds for the work I would do at IBM.

Fast-forward to 2002, when Joseph Bertolotti and I (center of the photo) were leading GLBT Business Development, the coolest startup I've been part of so far, and which I'm proud is more global and more successful than ever through Yvette Burton's, Andreas Citak's and Tony Tenicela's leadership today. This 2002 ad was U.S.-centric by design, as it ran only in U.S.-based GLBT magazines, e.g., "OUT" and "The Advocate." My rabbi, openly lesbian herself, and leading the world's largest congregation of GLBT Jews and our friends, held up a copy of the ad from the pulpit when it first came out and celebrated that it featured one of her congregants. This was the same period when I was trying to conceive a child through IUI and an anonymous donor; unfortunately, I did not succeed. The other Sarah, in the foreground, gave birth to a girl some months later -- she's visibly pregnant in the photo -- and Rahel, between the Sarah's, gave birth to twin-girls. Ultimately, Rahel left IBM because she was part of GBS and did not want to travel so much with young children; she took a job at a financial services client, with no travel. And Marcelo on the far-left retired, so time did march on.

By 2004, I had moved from the GLBT business development role to what would become IBM's Center for Learning and Development, and was facilitating leadership development programs for our first-line leaders and emerging leaders, and then for new execs and our leader of India/South Asia and his direct reports. Six years later, I look at myself and see someone, who is as spirited as my 13-year-old self, who's happily paired with a Jewish woman for the past 18+ years, and who's dedicated to mentoring colleagues in their leadership development; I see someone who should make my principal proud.

Finally, by 2010, we launched a new campaign and when Andreas invited people from the New York area (which is where our ad agency is) to be photographed for the ad, I made sure to participate. I was talking with some new friends at Out & Equal, being self-effacing about my choice to model again for a GLBT-specific campaign; "Oh, it's only because I live in the NY-area, and maybe I like attention and..." but one of the friends challenged my vanity-explanation. She made me admit aloud that no, it's not only attention-seeking that drives me to pose for our ads; it really is a wish to raise our community's visibility. And I guess my rabbi, if not my principal in his Orthodoxy, recognized the act as a form of community leadership.

Jewish Or Not...Lesbian Or Not

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Realistic Appearance and Apparent Reality

This weekend, I read an article in the Sunday "New York Times" magazine, that focused on how particularly Jewish-American immigrants in Israel need to prove their Jewish identity when they wish to marry there, since marriage is overseen by the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, rather than by the government.

Yesterday, a friend told me that he felt somehow Jewish, though to his knowledge, he came from a family that even had its own crest. I woke up this morning, thinking of a Yiddish expression I've heard my mom use: the "pintele Yid" (the "Jewish spark"). She always applied it to reluctant Jews, who somehow seemed to be drawn back to their heritage in later-life. This was not the case for my friend, but still, it reminded me of the attraction my mom spoke of.

This afternoon, one of my mother's long-time, actively, culturally Jewish friends, who she hadn't seen in some time -- and who I hadn't seen in years -- said that her daughter had been with her female partner for 25 years and yet unlike me, the daughter had not yet wanted to be affiliated with any Jewish community [due to the Orthodox rejection of her as a lesbian]. "I need to work on her," she said.

"For me, I think I was nostalgic for the tunes and rituals I learned in [Modern Orthodox Jewish] school and so I couldn't stay away," I said.

Telling me goodbye, she said a bit urgently, it seemed, perhaps, in case we never saw each other again, "You look well and should stay well. I'm in the forefront of gay marriage activism [at nearly 90 years old]."

I kissed her cheek in response and said, "Thank you for your leadership."

If she didn't declare it, no one would know of her activism just by looking at her. And perhaps no one would know her daughter was a lesbian if her daughter didn't tell them explicitly; I had no recollection of "gaydar" [rhymes with radar and means being able to sense when someone is gay] being triggered in me by any of her children. No one would know about my Christian friend's paradoxical pintele Yid either, unless he told them.

When I worked in Schaumburg, Illinois, for the technology arm of Sears, Roebuck & Co., one of my colleagues wanted to know how it was possible that I was Jewish, since I had blue eyes.

I wrote about this here before, I think, but I responded, "Both of my parents have blue eyes; Russia, where both sides of my family are from originally, had a lot of pogroms, where soldiers pillaged Jewish villages, so maybe they're from that time; I don't know...."

What if I weren't really Jewish?

How ironic! During the era of the Holocaust, people had to prove they were not Jewish and today, in Israel, they had to prove they were. What a strange sensation -- to be worried that anyone would ever challenge the veracity of my Jewish identity, and what a luxury, I guess, compared with the danger my people had been in at various times historically, where they would have been happy to pass as non-Jews.

Blue eyes and tall height aside, growing up, I did always feel that people, who had met other Jews, and who did not yet know my name, which is a giveaway, wouldn't be surprised to learn that I was Jewish. (In my experience, the majority of Jews I have known have not been particularly tall or blue-eyed.)

My parents reinforced the identity so much that it never was a question for me until my colleague challenged me at work. And then, I provided a flippant, yet perhaps realistic, answer.

Fierce Pride

Just as my parents nurtured me to be proud of my Jewish identity, I nurtured myself -- with the help of the gay, lesbian, bi and trans (GLBT) community -- to be proud of my lesbian identity. And that identity got challenged a bit more often, oddly, since I felt, also, that I did not pass as heterosexual. My mother had a colleague, for example -- a fellow art collector, who was in his eighties -- who told me even after meeting Pat, "If I were 20 years younger, I'd woo you."

I just looked at him incredulously.

Today, I saw him again, a few years later and he said, "You're looking as beautiful as ever. Where's your partner?"

"She's not interested in the topic of the lecture."

"You're still together, though?"

"Yes, for nearly 16 years so far."

"That's longer than I was married to either of my wives."

I smiled at him and kept walking.

In the same edition of "The New York Times," this weekend, I read that "Tootsie" and "Some Like It Hot," both of which were films about men, posing as women, were deemed the top two funniest films of all time.

What was it about people, watching people, being fooled by mistaken identity that was so ultimately entertaining?

Why was it hilarious as fiction, but in reality, depending on the era, at a minimum unbelievable and at worst, highly dangerous? And how could my pride have been anything other than fierce with the challenging histories that the Jews and the GLBT communities have had?

Over the years, a number of people asked me why I was so earnest, particularly around role-modeling. Last week, I was asked again after saying that although it was a lot of pressure, I tried to be exemplary as often as I could....Now, I did not define what I meant by "exemplary," which when I considered it further, mostly meant, striving to be authentic; in any case, a black colleague asked me, "Doesn't that get exhausting?"

I wanted to respond, but did not: "I can't believe you can't relate. As someone from an historically-underrepresented group, I would think you'd understand the aspiration to be a leader despite your minority status, along with the importance of making it, so that the next generation of your people could see hope of success by your example."

Perhaps, I was just extra-conscious of my identity compared to most people....

NYC Pride Parade

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Near 14th Street in the Village, I saw a woman sobbing as she looked at our synagogue's parade banner and the huge contingent of us, marching along with the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). She was shaking and tears streamed down her face. Her mascara was getting wrecked.

She was in her early-20s and pretty, with long, wavy, sandy-blond hair. There was a taller, attractive woman, standing behind her, holding her. If I had passed her in, say, the Short Hills Mall, I wouldn't have picked her as a member of the LGBT community, though probably wouldn't have been surprised that she was Jewish. She reminded me of a late-adolescent version of my niece's female classmates.

Excusing myself from my fellow-marchers, including Pat, I walked back over to her. Not yet knowing what I would say to comfort her, I just held out my hand to shake hers.

My sunglasses shaded my eyes and I wished I had removed them, so that we would have made full eye-contact. Still, I found something to say: "I went to a [Modern Orthodox Jewish] day school [and I imagine you must have done so, too]."

"I *teach* at a day school," she said.

Oy, no wonder she was in pain. She was at the parade with her girlfriend, but likely was not able to be herself in all her humanity at the day school because perhaps she feared losing her job if she were.

I held her hand for long enough to feel that mine was warmer from the heat of marching, and that she was glad to have the contact from someone who was openly lesbian and openly Jewish at once.

It's my hope that my face had a compassionate expression when I shook her hand further and said, "Be well. Zay gezunt (Be healthy)."

It would be wonderful if she were moved to say the Shehecheyanu prayer in honor of today, and ultimately could feel peace.

One of the terrific songs that both of our choruses sang together as we marched down Fifth Avenue was, "Od yavo shalom aleinu...v'al kulam (Peace will yet come to us...and to everyone)."

This year, we marched together with MCC, as our rabbi and MCC's reverend both were chosen to be grand marshalls of the parade. The crowd loved our unity. My ears still hear their cheering.

How have you reconciled, or how are you reconciling, elements of your complex identity?