In the past 45 years of this span and particularly accelerating over the past 20 years, most developed countries have also experienced advocacy for rights on behalf of persons with non-mainstream sexual identities, including lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered persons, and persons of self-identified queer or questioning sexuality—collectively identified by the acronym LGBTQ.

Because sexual identity may not result in obvious characteristics making LGBTQ individuals recognizable to others as a distinct minority group, the political movement for LGBTQ rights has focused on the importance of self-identification, colloquially referred to as “coming out of the closet.” Yet, professional local government managers may tend to shy away from openly advocating an issue that some believe is in conflict with such other values as religious liberty.

In fact, one of the guidelines accompanying Tenet 7 of the ICMA Code of Ethics—Personal Advocacy of Issues—states that “members may advocate for issues of personal interest only when doing so does not conflict with the performance of their official duties.” How do local government managers who identify as LGBTQ balance these expectations?

How do other managers include LGBTQ employees within the guideline to Tenet 11 that says “it should be the members’ personal and professional responsibility to actively recruit and hire a diverse staff throughout their organizations,” without running afoul of political dynamics within their communities?

Some Common Themes

To help shed some light on the state of these questions as ICMA celebrates its centennial, I interviewed eight self-identified lesbians and gay men who are ICMA members in the West Coast Region and are active local government professionals at levels ranging from analyst through city and county managers.

While they comprise only a small sample of LGBTQ members within ICMA, their responses did include common themes that offer valuable insights into how these managers negotiate the tensions inherent in serving entire communities while attempting to positively influence LGBTQ equality.

For most, tension exists between being privately proud of their identity and publicly cautious about what may be a controversial self-identification. One man, a management analyst in a midsize community, viewed this question through the lens of future employability: “I have had serious concerns about becoming politically active in the LGBT[Q] fight for equality where my name would be mentioned in newspapers or online as a vocal supporter, for fear of being viewed as an activist or someone who might have problems drawing the bright line between politics and administration in my professional life.”

Similarly, a woman who is city manager of a large community said, “I assume you won’t be using my name, because while I’m out in how I live my life, I’m not comfortable with my sexual identity being the reason I’m mentioned in PM magazine.”

Issues of Acceptance

I have personal experience with this private/public conflict. My husband was formerly involved in the political movement to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. At one point, he wrote a letter to the editor of a local newspaper critical of the mayor of one of our local cities who had not been supportive of a resolution advocating extension of marriage rights.

That former mayor is now one of my employers as a member of the county board of supervisors. Fortunately for me, my husband’s letter opened a dialogue with this particular elected official, and she has been supportive of me in my professional capacity since she joined the board.

A second theme to emerge from my conversations is that the individuals I interviewed have varying experiences with discrimination, either to themselves or to their partners. One man, a city manager in the San Francisco Bay Area, responded with a flat “never” when asked whether he had faced discrimination because of his sexual identity and stated, “My partner has been treated no better or no worse than any other spouse. He has been very widely accepted.”

Former ICMA Executive Board member Pat Martel, city manager of Daly City, California, reports, “My partner/wife has been embraced and treated with absolute respect by my colleagues, the boards, and councils I have served and the public.

“I must admit that when I was elected to serve as a West Coast Regional Vice President on the ICMA Board and I took my wife to the first board meeting I attended so that she could participate in the Partners Program, there were a number of raised eyebrows. It was a first for both the board and the Partners Program. In due time, when the board members and their partners got to know both of us, they learned that we are ordinary people who have an extraordinary opportunity to help educate others about acceptance of differences.”

By contrast, another respondent said: “I felt attacked for my sexual identity when I was a finalist for the city manager position in [a city in Oregon], and a blogger wrote something about how I’d get the job because of me being a lesbian because [the city] was so politically correct, the implication being that I wasn’t necessarily qualified for the job.”

Similarly, the management analyst stated, “It has run the gamut from total acceptance to supervisors actively discouraging me from sharing information about my sexual identity and family status.” The Bay Area city manager who reported never having been discriminated against offered a caveat: “Things might be different, though, in different parts of the state or country. It has probably made me more selective in where I choose to work.”

That sentiment was reinforced in a story related to me by former ICMA Executive Board President Bill Buchanan, county manager, Sedgwick County, Kansas: “Several years ago it came to my attention [that] some very good employees left our employment because we did not provide health insurance to domestic partners whether they were the same gender or not. I did some research and found that most of the local business community provided insurance for domestic partners.

“I visited with [elected officials] privately and had received only one objection to provide all employees with two-person or family coverage no matter what the status of the relationship. Within hours after we sent out the new policy to employees that included the ability to have domestic partners covered by the county’s health insurance, the phones began to ring. A firestorm of protests began, and the political support I had disappeared within 24 hours.”

A gay male county manager from Oregon offered a story about changing the mind of an initially non-supportive elected official in a former community: “One member of the council said he would not support hiring me as the manager due to me being gay. I later learned he was deeply religious.

“I agreed to the interview, they offered me the job, I accepted, and was appointed on a 6 to 1 vote. By the end of my tenure, the deeply religious councilor had become one of my most ardent supporters and said he was saddened to see me go.”

And the large-city manager was proud of her accomplishment in achieving benefits for other employees: “In two different Bay Area jurisdictions, I was able to demand that domestic partner benefits—before it became state law—be extended to employees as a condition of accepting a job offer. This was when I was operating at a department-head level. In both jurisdictions, the city managers—and ultimately the councils—stepped up and did the right thing—benefiting me and my family, but oh-so-many others, too.”

Finding Mentors

A final theme to emerge from these conversations is that only one of the respondents, an administrative analyst with the city and county of San Francisco, had a mentor in the profession who was LGBTQ-identified. In that instance, it was a matter of happenstance.

“I randomly connected with this mentor through the Cal-ICMA program and did not know he was gay. I chose to reach out to him based on his qualifications and experience. Only afterwards did I learn that he was gay.”

Other respondents indicated that while they lacked LGBTQ mentors, they had supportive groups of LGBTQ peers. A suburban city manager in northern California, for example, stated it “would have been nice to have a mentor who was gay, but I did have a couple other city managers my age to talk to when needed.”

 

Advice Going Forward

It is dangerous to attempt to draw any conclusions from such a small group of individual professionals. They were, however, remarkably consistent when asked what advice they would offer to LGBTQ individuals considering local government management as a career in ICMA’s second century: “Above all else, be yourself.” And, “be strategic.”

This wisdom is likely applicable across the profession and throughout time.