“I Love Gay People”
I once had a coworker I’m going to call Maggie. And Maggie loved gay people. I know that, because she explicitly told me when she learned I was gay, probably six months into working together.
Up to that point, Maggie and I had collaborated on a few projects, but were in different departments and didn’t socialize outside of work. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were gay!” she exclaimed, before sharing how much she loved going to drag shows, shopping, and watching Bravo with “her gays.” She then demanded to know my favorite Real Housewives franchise, and seemed genuinely surprised I didn’t have one.
Maggie started stopping by my desk every morning to share gossip and dating stories that I truly never asked about. Our collaborations, which used to be productive, turned into her giving me show or book recommendations her gay friends loved. I gritted my teeth until I couldn’t.
I tried to politely explain to Maggie that while plenty of gay men love drag, Bravo, and her dating stories, they weren’t things that interested me—and that while I don’t doubt good intent, the way she assumed all gay people are the same was frankly reductive.
According to a 2024 study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, which researches sexual orientation and gender identity in law and public policy, nearly half of LGBTQ+ employees have experienced discrimination, harassment, or stereotyping at work. Nearly half aren’t out to supervisors at work—a percentage that’s increased in the past year.
More data from the Human Rights Campaign suggests that trend may be worsening: 47% of LGBTQ+ respondents report they are less out in at least one area of their lives than they were the year before.
I want to make it very clear: I’m not saying Maggie harassed or discriminated against me by any means. Stereotype, absolutely—but there wasn’t malice. If anything, in that particular office, the incident made her look foolish. (After this all went down, my then office-mate would Slack me things like, “Quick Pat, Maggie’s coming up, get on your mesh tank top, stat!”).
But it illustrates something that often gets lost when we talk about the LGBTQ workplace experience. It’s not just open bigots or textbook chauvinists. It’s often well-meaning colleagues—and even LGBTQ+ folks themselves—who inadvertently perpetuate the idea that shared identity means shared experience.
And I thought that Pride Month—which Maggie, whom I still follow on Instagram, is celebrating with fervor (and, good for her)—is as good a time as any to make a PSA: the LGBTQ+ experience is not a monolith.
Shared Identity Isn’t Shared Experience—the LGBTQ+ Experience is Vast
In the United States, roughly 31 million adults identify as something other than straight, including more than 5 million gay Americans.
At the job I had after Maggie, I worked closely with another gay colleague I really liked, but his experience as a Gen Z gay man—and, by extension, his relationship to his sexuality and the world—is very different than my millennial one. When I was his age, “gay” was still a widely accepted pejorative. But today, nearly a quarter of adults under 30 identify as something other than straight.
“Our brains are wired to take shortcuts, or what sociologists call schemas,” sociologist Dr. Travis Speice, who studies sexuality and gender, told me. “These are mental frameworks that help us process and recall complex information more efficiently. The problem is that when we apply those shortcuts to entire groups of people, we stop seeing individuals. We flatten them into caricatures.”
While people may have good intentions, lumping individuals into groups is a misstep.
How People Become Types
“Shared identity doesn’t mean shared experience. A cisgender lesbian and a transgender woman might have little in common beyond being members of the LGBTQ+ community,” licensed marriage and family therapist Chris Tompkins told me. “Treating them as interchangeable, even with good intentions, sends a subtle message that they’re seen as a group rather than as individuals.”
Tompkins penned an article, How Stereotypes Inform the Way Gay Men See Themselves, that references Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie’s The Danger of a Single Story TED Talk, which explores the consequences of using one narrative to define a group of people—and how that tactic’s often been used to marginalize. As Speice points out: “The idea of a singular ‘LGBTQ+ community’ isn’t necessarily rooted in shared culture; it’s rooted in shared oppression. The LGBTQ+ rights movement was born in resistance to that kind of oppression.”
I’d actually found Tompkins’ article while noticing a proliferation of LGBTQ+ content creators themselves flattening the communities they represented into a singular narrative. Scroll any part of the internet (especially many LGBTQ+ outlets, unfortunately), and you’ll encounter videos explaining “why gay men do X,” “things all lesbians understand,” or “why LGBTQ+ people are leaving Pride.”
Algorithms reward certainty and broad claims. “Some gay men” doesn’t perform the way “gay men are” does. As a result, we consume increasingly narrow stories about increasingly diverse populations, and then creators present their own experiences as universal. Audiences hungry for simple explanations embrace them. Before long, we’re the ones telling one story, turning complex groups into types.
Organizations can do the same thing: In efforts to be inclusive, they learn enough about groups to recognize that they exist, but end up erasing the individuality. People become categories, which become assumptions.
“We’re wired to look for patterns and to sort people into categories with labels, because organizing the world is easier and more regulating than holding its complexity,” Tomkins told me..
In her TED Talk, Adichie says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
The Cost of a Single Story
Single stories aren’t always inaccurate. Plenty of gay men do love Housewives and drag. But once a group becomes a type, individuals become easier to dismiss. False narratives become easier to spread.
History is chock full of examples of people taking the actions, beliefs, or behaviors of a few and applying them to whole populations, especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ populations. Whether it’s the stereotype that gay men are promiscuous (and thus, disease-spreading), transgender people are dangerous, or that we’re all trying to groom your kids, broad generalizations often become the foundation for discrimination and hate.
That’s why I think it matters even when well-meaning colleagues or LGBTQ+ people themselves perpetuate these narratives: Sure, the stakes may feel lower when a woman assumes every gay man wants to give her dating advice than when a politician weaponizes a stereotype. But they share the same instinct: reducing people to digestible soundbites.
Dr. Stefanie K. Johnson is a professor of Organizational Leadership at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Research suggests that inclusion requires both belonging and uniqueness. Belonging means feeling accepted and valued by the group. Uniqueness means feeling that your distinct perspectives, experiences, and contributions are recognized,” she says.
“When someone experiences belonging without uniqueness, they may feel welcomed, but also stereotyped. They become ‘the gay employee’—rather than a talented engineer, manager, teacher, or colleague, who also happens to be gay.”
This helped me understand why Maggie’s assumptions bothered me so much. The issue wasn’t that her assumptions were entirely wrong. It was that they weren’t mine. They morphed me from her coworker Pat into her gay coworker Pat.
And at work, those distinctions matter. Once people start seeing you as a category first and a colleague second, assumptions have a way of multiplying.
“The most inclusive environments allow people to bring important aspects of their identity to work without being defined by any single one,” Johnson says. “Instead of assuming what matters to someone because of their background, ask open-ended questions, listen, and pay attention to the interests, strengths, goals, and experiences they choose to share.”
“The most inclusive leaders recognize that identity matters and that individuality matters. They create environments where people can be proud of who they are without feeling boxed in by it.”
Pride Month is often framed as a celebration of LGBTQ+ visibility. That’s important. But visibility only gets us so far if the people being seen are reduced to a single story. The goal isn’t to treat LGBTQ+ employees the same—it’s to recognize that they’re not.
