The pink triangle was sewn on the prison clothes of gay Germans during the thousand year Reich.   It was meant to be a stigma, a sign that here was a prisoner who was the lowest of the low.   Lambda was the first symbol we embraced for ourselves, as a statement of identity and pride.   It was chosen in 1970 by the Gay Activists Alliance of New York, and in 1974 was declared the official international symbol for gay and lesbian rights by the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland.   It signifies unity under oppression.

I came out to myself on December 15th, 1971 (yes, I remember the exact moment), and as per my nerd genes, instantly began reading everything I could on the subject…which wasn’t much that made any sense since it was nearly all written by heterosexuals.   A classmate I was massively crushing on had put an arm around me as we walked together out of school, sending me into a happy rush of delight, tinged with the feel of physical closeness to him.   It sent me right into the stratosphere.   I spent the rest of that day rushing over and over on the memory of his smile, and the feeling of his embrace.   Nothing in my life had ever been so wonderful.   That was when I finally had to admit it.   Yeah Bruce…you’re gay… And in that moment I knew that everything I had been taught up to then about homosexuals and homosexuality was wrong.   So when I read that it was a sickness, I simply discarded it as ignorant.   In the Civil Rights/Johnson-Nixon/Vietnam years it wasn’t difficult for a teenager to know that the grownups could be astoundingly stupid.

But that was only a few years after Stonewall, and that first gay pride march in New York City, and even in such an urban place as the Washington D.C. suburbs, a gay teenager was still very isolated from his kind. It was a couple years later before I saw my first issue of The Advocate, which had been carefully added to the packing of a shipment of cameras the store I was working for received from a distributor in San Francisco.   I stuffed it into my backpack, squirreled it home and devoured it (I still have it carefully saved away as a bit of personal history).   There was a world out there where others like me lived.   But finding it closer to home was difficult.

When I discovered, finally the Lambda Rising Bookstore downtown, a world of information and literature opened up before me.   And…knickknacks!   I bought a little Lambda necklace and wore it constantly.   I painted lambdas on my backpacks, so expertly I had people question where I’d managed to buy one with a lambda on it.   And I had a little Lambda bumper sticker for my car.   Partly it was the joy of being able to identify in a way that the hostile world around me wouldn’t recognize…most of the time.   But mostly it was this: a lot of us back then who didn’t live in New York, LA or San Francisco were lost and alone in a world that hated us.   I wore the lambda mostly as a little wave of the hand, to anyone who might see it, so to say, Hi…you’re not alone…

Time passes…the universe expands…and one day a newer, better symbol for our struggle emerged.   There is a quote…I can’t find it now but I recall it as something like a flag that truly represents its people isn’t decided on by a committee but torn out of them from their lives and their experience.   In 1978 Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag for that year’s Gay Freedom Celebration in San Francisco. By the time I was a successful contract software developer, it had pretty much completely superseded the Lambda.   So where my first car had worn a little Lambda sticker on the back, my first new car since emerging from poverty, the Geo Prism, wore a little rainbow.   In the 1990s I was still saying ‘Hi…‘, though it was becoming less and less of a need.

In those days one of my contracts was at a company located in the deep Baltimore suburbs…almost in the sticks.   I was doing well as a software developer, not only because I had a mind for it, but also it fit very well to be in a trade where I could go to work in blue jeans and sneakers, and wear my hair long and not get any static from management.   The computer geeks of the PC revolution, so unlike the suit and tie IBM mainframe guys, were a notoriously non-conformist bunch.   It was even okay to be gay…some of the big names in our field were, and the rest knew perfectly well how to evaluate a statement as true or false.   The demonizing crap homophobes spread about us just did not find very good soil amongst the computer nerds.   That’s not to say it didn’t occasionally take root here and there all the same.

I had been at the job site about a week, when one day I saw the manager stop abruptly as he passed my car in the company parking lot.   I saw him stare at the little rainbow bumper sticker on the back like someone had parked a turd in one of the parking spaces.   I went inside and shrugged it off.   I wasn’t one of their employees, I was a contractor and we contractors didn’t matter.   We did our work and when it was done we went on to the next job somewhere else.   That was my life, and in those days I was fine with that.   It allowed me to keep office politics and personality conflicts at arm’s length.   And as he was managing the company IT division, I assumed he knew from experience that us computer geeks came in a lot of odd varieties.   I didn’t think I would get any static about it.

But in less than an hour I was called into his office, along with my contract agency’s lead (there were several of us working that contract there), and told that I was being fired.   For…ah…low productivity.   I looked him right in the eyes as he said it and I’m sure my expression telegraphed exactly what I was thinking of him then.   But I got up, expressed a perfunctory regret that I was not satisfactory and hoped he wouldn’t see that as a reflection on my agency, and my agency rep and I left his office.

As I gathered my things to leave the building, my rep wore a bewildered, somewhat disturbed look.   “I don’t get this…” he says, “You’ve only been here a couple weeks and you’ve been doing fine.   Nobody expects a new guy to be one-hundred percent in just a couple weeks…but you’ve been doing great…”   Then he looks me right in the eyes…I could see his conscience was getting to him…and says, “It really makes you wonder…”   All I could say was, “Yeah…I know…”

Getting a little first hand look at discrimination in the workplace are we…?

It was the height of the dot-com boom and I left there confidant I would have work elsewhere, if not the next day then within a week.   My agency got me another contract almost immediately and I put it aside.   There are some forms of rejection that really get to me and I can’t help it, but those are about my artwork.   I have never felt the sting of it when it concerned business, and never, thankfully, when it was over my sexual orientation.   I came out to myself one December evening in 1971, and in that wonderful rush of first love I saw the truth, and ever since hate has just rolled off me like water off a duck’s back.   I think of my first love, and discard hate as simply ignorant.   That was the last job I ever lost when an employer found out I am gay, but it was hardly the only one.   And gay people are still very much at risk.   But I can think of at least one straight guy out there somewhere, who when he hears that gay Americans don’t need protection from job discrimination, would know from first hand experience exactly why we do.   In retrospect that teaching moment was worth getting fired for.