dailyeatings

When I first interviewed for my current job, the woman who was to eventually become my immediate boss described the working environment as particularly diverse, even for a non-profit. I assumed she referred to the generous representation of ethnic minorities I saw as I walked down the hallways or perhaps the bylaws that require a majority of our corporate board come directly from our service population, one which skews highly towards economically disadvantaged segments of the greater Chicagoland area. I was only partially right.

My work really is very ethnically diverse—in my half of the floor, out of 14 offices, there are only 5 staffed by Caucasians, one of which is a first generation Ukrainian immigrant. The majority of staff are women, which I’ve heard is par for the course at any non-profit, and jobs tend to be heavily concentrated in service delivery, with a surprising (to me) de-emphasis on support as compared to other industries, which is also normal for the kind of work, I’m told. All said, none of these are truly shocking or difficult to deal with—in fact, I don’t recall the last time my boss wasn’t a female, and I’ve pretty much had to deal with minority issues since I discovered who the person in the mirror was. There are a few things, though, that I had never experienced before.

First, I have many gay coworkers, and their sexuality is such a non-issue that it makes me forget at times that homophobia is truly a concern outside my non-profit-working, NPR-listening, blog-reading world. Even though I have had gay friends since essentially late middle school, I’d never had any real experience relating to older adults living in long-term committed homosexual relationships prior to starting this job. I had somewhat conceived that, of course, the kind of relationships I knew of in high school and college surely must extend into the post-graduate world in the same way for gay couples that were true for my straight friends, at least emotionally.

The matter of how to describe those relationships, however, and the various titles assigned to romantic companions has been a matter of delicacy that I’m still getting the hang of. Most of my coworkers who are in committed same-sex relationships prefer the term “partner”, with my next-door office neighbor going so far as to chuckle and tell me, “I’m too old for a girlfriend, David!” At first, this label seemed to lack many things, including any sort of gender-role specificity (”Wait, so which one of you is the… and the… um…”), affection (since it’s a word that connotes to me entrepreneurship, doubles tennis matches, or pairs dancing) and gravitas (some of these relationships span decades, all without the right to make public vows, putting to shame some of my already-divorced 20-something friends’ attempts at “for better or worse”). But upon further examination, perhaps the ambiguity of the word with its lack of attendant social expectations suits these relationships, and maybe it’s just my heterocentric need to force their relationships into my paradigm—if they are fine with the term, I guess there shouldn’t be any need to further elaborate. A somewhat unexpected side-effect of this is that now whenever I see people list themselves in same-sex relationships on Facebook, I completely take them at their word unless told otherwise.

Secondly, and this proved much more difficult to deal with that then first—I’m one of only two males even remotely close to my age on the entire floor. In fact, we are likely the only two single males under the age of 30 in the entirety of the administrative offices. Even in the midst of all this racial, ethnic, sexual and economic diversity, I find myself in a new super-minority: that of the single, straight 20-something male. Once, while casually chatting with one of the guys who works upstairs in IT, he offhandedly asked if I had any kids yet. I laughed. His reply crystallized for me how different I was from the rest of the staff here, even if it’s not a simple issue of age, since he’s only five years older than me.

He has three kids.