From Margin to Mainstream: Gay Men at the Leadership Frontier

With the support and encouragement of the gay community center leaders in New York, I brought together a group of gay men, who are self-identified as gay and who are also leaders in the business (or organizational) community. I designed and conducted a weekend-long workshop retreat, with 18 participants, and also interviewed a subset of the participants following the session. The weekend retreat took place in a country setting outside of New York City, where the participants had ample opportunity to dialogue and reflect together, as well as spend time being in nature. The retreat consisted of a wide range of activities, including discussions, dialogue, creating artwork, meditation, visualizations and play. The following "goals" or intentions were incorporated throughout all aspects of the retreat and the follow-up interviews:

Goal # 1--to explore what happens to the very nature of leadership as traditionally oppressed individuals become leaders in the world.

Goal #2--to serve and support the growth of gay men to express themselves fully as contributors--transformational catalysts--in a society sorely in need of change.

Goal # 3-- to foster reform of our patriarchal system and culture, by supporting and encouraging increasing numbers of gay men to take on leadership roles in the world.

Goal # 4-- to expand and re-envision the role of gay men in shattering the myths of our culture, namely, the heroic, masculine myth of achievement, power and control, and the myth of the exalted frontier individualist over against the denigrated feminine (who animates the worlds of the arts, theater and film, as well as community and family).

Within the context of the above goals, the primary research questions of this summer fieldwork were as follows: what are the unique gifts that gay men bring to their roles as leaders in the business and wider community, and from a depth psychological perspective, what might it mean for gay men to "lead with soul"?

Jeffrey Hull