By Michael Armentrout–
“We’ve been told you’re gay. Are you?”
This question didn’t create a dilemma because telling our truth is our right and responsibility. “I’ve never lied to you and I never will. Yes, I’m gay. I’ve conducted my professional life and done the job you’ve asked me to do with total success. What goes on in my private life is private.”
That’s when, in 1990, my managerial career in financial services came to an end. I was in the midst of a big promotion when I was outed by a former employee who had an axe to grind with me. It wasn’t that he knew I was gay, but rather that I kept social ties to other, also closeted, gay men in Wilmington, North Carolina.
I was a Vice President in the investment division of one of America’s largest corporations. Surprisingly, the company had a clear policy of non-discrimination, but North Carolina is an employment-at-will state and I didn’t have any recourse. We’ve always known that you can be fired on trumped up charges and false allegations and it happens all of the time.
I negotiated fiercely for weeks about my management track career and was assured that they weren’t discriminating against me. They’d be supportive of me managing “in New York or San Francisco where gay people live.” Eye rolling in its ignorance, isn’t it?
When I’d answered the question honestly, my boss, an Executive Vice President, shared this information broadly across the company. Once you’re out at work, you have to be out everywhere. The questions come flying from family and friends about what happened and I was yet again in the position of truth-telling or lying. So, you tell the truth. It was devastating.
After months of grieving and therapy, I began to emerge from my depressed state of mind and turned my attention to pitching in on the fight for equality. I became a volunteer at the local AIDS Service Agency in Raleigh and began doing educational sessions in schools and workplaces on HIV/AIDS and how it is transmitted and how to protect oneself.
I joined the board of North Carolina Pride, which is now Equality North Carolina. I dug deeply into the work, first in North Carolina, and then at the national level on the Board of the Human Rights Campaign. From adversity, I immersed myself into lobbying Congress for the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the Ryan White Care Act that provides billions a year in funding for HIV/AIDS.
It’s true—there are gay people in San Francisco. I moved here in 2007 with the plan to change my career from corporate America to the nonprofit sector. I’ve worked for AIDS/Breast Cancer Emergency Funds, UCSF, as the president of a foundation, and now Executive Director of Maitri Compassionate Care.
Maitri was founded in 1987 by a Buddhist monk, Issan Dorsey, at the Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro. Issan took in a student who was dying with AIDS and had nowhere to go. Soon, Issan believed he could care for another person with AIDS and then another.
Today, Maitri continues to provide hospice and palliative care for people in the last moments of their lives. We also provide respite care for people with HIV/AIDS who need assistance while we help them organize their lives to return to independent living. In a new initiative, Maitri, has created a pre-/post-operative gender affirmation center for people in transition and in need of care.
I’ve found the right place for me.
Michael Armentrout is the Executive Director of Maitri Compassionate Care https://www.maitrisf.org/
Published on April 7, 2022
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