Former BP CEO John Browne on Corporate Life in the Closet

Bloomberg Businessweek: How were LGBT people treated when you first started working?

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Lord Browne: I was born a long time ago, 1948, and while I was at university, it was still illegal to be gay and actually have gay sex. You could go to prison. The law changed halfway through my time there. But before then, people were terrified to be anything other than totally straight, otherwise you could be blackmailed or you could find yourself in terrible trouble. So the law changed, and nothing actually happened. The behavior of many years was still there—that basically people did not approve of people being gay. They thought they were weak. They thought they were unreliable. They thought they were people that really shouldn’t be part of a business world, an academic world, a commercial world. So everyone pretended to be straight, and, indeed, so did I.

So, in the closet …

I was, you know, the son of an Auschwitz survivor. She told me two important things: One is, never tell anyone a secret, because they’ll surely use it against you. And the second is, never be a member of an identifiable minority, because when the going gets tough, the majority always hurts the minority. And in her experience, that was spot on. So I [had] a straight public life and a deeply secret gay life, which I rarely indulged in. I kept two lives separate, like many people, and I made sure they never collided.

You knew from the start you’d have to stay in the closet?

Yes, and I knew that, because all references to gay people were pejorative. Everyone used gay jokes. It was a time when some important British politician before my time said, “Well I thought men like that would take a glass of whisky and a revolver and do the right thing to themselves in their study.” You know, kill themselves. And that was the way people thought about it.

Was there anything unique about the energy industry?

The energy industry was certainly macho, that’s for sure. And I say that was clearly the case, because there was almost no women in the business. I remember one woman engineer that I was with when I joined BP. She was a brilliant engineer and quickly left because she couldn’t stand the environment. It was a macho environment, but it was not the only industry. Until quite recently, Silicon Valley was a pretty tough place to be—people said frat house. It was sort of not appropriate either for women or for gay people. And sometimes these go hand in hand. Industries have struggled so long to get gender equality. We’ve been at it 60, 70, 80 years, and we still haven’t achieved the right level. For LGBT we started much later, so it’s hardly surprising it’s behind. It really takes time for people to believe that they’re safe to be who they are.

What is the importance of role models?

I never had a role model. A successful role model is the single-most important thing, because it’s more powerful than lecturing people or the corporate brochure which says, “We stand for equality, we stand for inclusion, we stand for diversity.” They’re important things to say, but actually the most important thing is seeing: “I can see her, I can see him, and they are being themselves.” That’s really important, and I think that makes people feel safe. In corporations you need to have the right attitudes [and] policies, but, importantly, people need to see that people are really included. It’s always as strong as the weakest link. So if a person is excluded, then people don’t believe.

Is there anything you wished you would have known about how the business world treats LGBT people when you started your career?

At the time I joined, I presumed that absolutely everybody treated LGBT badly and they were excluded. Today, I think if I were making a selection of a company, I really would want to press and see just how attitudes toward gay people have been developed and have things really changed? When I wrote my book The Glass Closet, we found a couple of women who were going through a recruitment fair. In recruitment—this is lawyers and bankers—and they were asking about LGBT activity. We asked them whether they were gay, and they said, “No we’re straight, but actually we’re interested to see how people are dealing with LGBT inclusion, because if they did that really well, then chances are they do gender even better.” I think there’s an important serious point here, which is about attitudes in mind about difference, inclusion, and diversity. It’s an attitude of mind that then comes through real activity on the ground.

And CEO models …

It’s quite difficult if you’re trying to find a role model CEO. In the S&P 500, the only one I know is [Apple Inc.’s] Tim Cook. Maybe there’s one or two others. There should be, say 5%, 25 CEOs at least. So either they’re in the closet, which is possible and very stressful for them and sad in that they’re not role models. Or it is the case that boards still remain very conservative and like to make sure they don’t take risks with people who aren’t just like them.

You came out in an unplanned way …

Very unplanned: I was outed.

How would you have preferred to come out?

I come back to role models. I [wished I’d had] people who were in business who were openly gay who could have come to me and said, “John, times have changed.” Because what I hadn’t realized in my head is that times had changed. And I believed firmly that all the things I thought that were signals given to me in my career had not changed—that everybody was the same, that attitudes hadn’t changed. So I wish I had a role model that could have come to me and said, “John, I think we all know you’re gay. It’s just that none of us were brave enough to come and tell you.”

You wish someone would have approached you like that?

I wish someone would have. But they didn’t. I had persuaded myself that the only protection I had was to remain in the closet, and that was completely wrong. I like to think today the glass is definitely half full. It may not be totally full, but half full compared with half empty.

What is the biggest fear you think gay people feel about coming out in business?

They feel several things, and I still feel this. One is, it’s an extra factor that gets in the way of promotion [and] your career development. Secondly, they still think that attitudes of clients and those outside major cities are still quite old-fashioned and they object to gay people. So that would change the way they deal with their official relationships. Thirdly, they may not have told their families, so that’s another factor that gets in the way of being open about yourself. We’re sitting here in London talking about this, and there are many gay people that can be openly gay. New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. But if we went north of here to the countryside, then attitudes might change. If we went north of New York City, it might change. If we went east of San Francisco or Los Angeles, things might change. So we are, to an extent, affected by the metropolitan environment we live in, where there are a lot of diverse people, and people are much more inclusive. I think attitudes take a long time to change.

Is there a personal anecdote about your coming out that sticks with you?

When I was outed, I decided that I would resign from BP, so I resigned, because I felt that I could neither take the company through what was going on nor did I feel entirely the board was completely happy with this. So I resigned, and I decided to leave BP through the front door. They said, “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the back door?” I said, “No, no I’ll go through the front door. I always come through the front door.”

The reception?

I’ve never seen press like that. The whole of St. James’s Square [was full]. And then I got into a car and went to my apartment followed by paparazzi on motorbikes. As I got into my apartment, people were on ladders and on the trees trying to take photographs. So I had to shut the blinds. For three days I was under siege. And actually after three days, as they say‚ there was huge coverage around the world. But the English expression is, “yesterday’s news is today’s fish-and-chips wrapper,” and I was then [that] fish-and-chip wrapper on Day 4. So I decided to go out. I went out shopping along King’s Road and what happened was an eye-opener for someone who thought they were going to lose all their respect and their friends. People started stopping me and saying things like, “We’re right behind you” and “We support you.” I was quite emotional, and I couldn’t handle it, so I had to go back to the apartment again. Then what really sorted it out, I had a deluge of supportive mail, and I realized then that life had changed and that people look at you as who you are, not who you think you should be. And it changed everything.

Have you taken on the role of mentoring or bravely confronting someone about their hidden sexuality in the way you wanted someone to do for you?

Yes, it hasn’t always worked. But I’ve helped people through, just to remind them that it’s not as if it’s an existential threat—it’s the reverse. But people do think that. What you build in your head after many years is a very complex picture of what you think people will do to you if things change. And it’s not surprising. It’s just that some secrets are more difficult to keep than others. Some are more damaging to keep. In some ways, would I like to have been outed the way I was? No. But thank goodness I was. Thank goodness I was because I can’t imagine what it would be like to have perpetuated that lie.
 
Interview by Kelly Gilblom

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