It’s a strange phenomenon when people talk about pride and coming out. Each person has their own personal and unique story to tell. Getting on in years, as junior lawyers keep reminding me, and as a 49-year-old I have been recalling my pride journey, reminiscing if you like.
I had always thought that I exuded pride and that this manifested in being out (and proud). It strikes me now that I was not entirely truthful with myself. Yes, family and friends had known me as out and proud since my early days in university (my sister would say from primary school, but what does she know?).
But, I now recall that I was actually a work cautious gay. For many years before training as a lawyer I worked in HR so I was the bastion and gate keeper of equality in the workplace but that was for others, not me, right? Heaven forbid any one asked about my home life, my family, my “wife”, my weekend or my holidays. Ah ha, but if they did I had all the stock answers that would kick them off “the scent” – the same for many of you reading this no doubt. My stock answers included, to the question of “Well, Paul what are you up to this long weekend?” “I’m off for a weekend with a group of lads.”
In fact, this group of lads was me, my partner and our two best friends, another long-term gay couple, heading for a pampering weekend at some rather pretentious hotel. To this day I do not know why I spent so much of my time hiding, what was, a delightful and privileged life.
It was perhaps symptomatic that it also meant that I flitted from job to job, not spending more than a few years anywhere. It is also strange that I then considered a change in career to law…a sector which, from the outside, I held to be full of traditional grey haired and grey suited hetero men – oh what was I thinking.
But, that’s what I did. To my surprise, when I started my training contract, at the ripe age of 34, and started my nonsense of presenting my alter-ego I realised that there was no kidding the other (much younger) trainees, who could spot a fob off at 200 metres. This was helped, or hindered, by the advent of smart phones and facebook. It was clear I had to come clean, I was going to have to be more than out, in fact out out. In a law firm…surely my career was ended before it started? Not at all, the trainee group were superb, accepting and supportive. And what about my various supervisors along the way? To my shock and surprise there was not an eyelid batted…a bit of a let-down really, as I had well prepared monologues and speeches about my equality and respecting my rights that I never had to use!! So there I was, finally out out.
This was my experience too in Pinsent Masons. I am proud to say that I took the respect that Pinsent Masons has in each and every person working for the firm and made this work for me and for the benefit of our Belfast office. I was done with working in a closed shop and I did not want to work in a place where I or my colleagues could not be fully comfortable about themselves and have to hide part of their true selves. So, with the help of our amazing HR manager, Gill Warwick, we set on cementing Pinsent Masons in Belfast as open and accepting of all our colleagues.
We developed ties with organisations in Northern Ireland, including the Rainbow Project, Working with Pride and Lawyers with Pride to ensure visibility of our pride in our people – visibility of acceptance and support being key to a culture of inclusion. We were also proud to have been one of the first members of the Rainbow Project’s Diversity Champions (now in partnership with Stonewall). Today, the Belfast office has one of the most active allies groups in the firm and we actively work for equality across Northern Ireland. I was extremely proud to have been given the support of the firm to play our part in the Businesses for Love Equality campaign. As a group we campaigned to promote not just the commercial benefits of equality but the moral, dignity and human rights of equal marriage; a right that was eventually won in Northern Ireland in early 2020.
Funny story – after qualifying as a lawyer I was asked to do some work for the company that I had worked in as an HR Manager. At a meeting with my ex-boss, turns out my attempts at an alter ego were in vain and in fact I was actually out out all the time…I was the only one who did not know it! Moral of the story – don’t waste your time thinking you need to be someone you are not, be your best self and hold your pride high.
Paul Gillen is a partner at Pinsent Masons
