The Queering of Corporate America
How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An accurate picture of the LGBTQ rights movement’s achievements is incomplete without this surprising history of how corporate America joined the cause.
Legal scholar Carlos Ball tells the overlooked story of how LGBTQ activism aimed at corporations since the Stonewall riots helped turn them from enterprises either indifferent to or openly hostile toward sexual minorities and transgender individuals into reliable and powerful allies of the movement for queer equality. As a result of street protests and boycotts during the 1970s, AIDS activism directed at pharmaceutical companies in the 1980s, and the push for corporate nondiscrimination policies and domestic partnership benefits in the 1990s, LGBTQ activism changed big business’s understanding and treatment of the queer community. By the 2000s, corporations were frequently and vigorously promoting LGBTQ equality, both within their walls and in the public sphere. Large companies such as American Airlines, Apple, Google, Marriott, and Walmart have been crucial allies in promoting marriage equality and opposing anti-LGBTQ regulations such as transgender bathroom laws.
At a time when the LGBTQ movement is facing considerable political backlash, The Queering of Corporate America complicates the narrative of corporate conservatism and provides insights into the future legal, political, and cultural implications of this unexpected relationship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this meticulous history, Ball (The First Amendment and LGBT Equality), a law professor at Rutgers University, writes eruditely on how the LGBTQ movement masterfully targeted, then conscripted, corporate America into a powerful ally in the fight for equality. The 1970s saw boycotts and antidiscrimination suits; Pacific Bell, then the largest employer in California, had an explicit policy not to hire "open homosexuals" because doing so would "disregard commonly accepted standards of conduct, morality, or lifestyles." Yet by the mid-1980s it had implemented policies to accommodate HIV-positive employees in the workplace and was considered a "role model" for LGBTQ-friendly firms. The movement successfully pressed for benefits for domestic partners in the 1990s (an opening wedge toward legal recognition of same sex marriage). Today, tech companies such as Angie's List, Apple, and Salesforce, but also traditional megacorporations such as General Mills and Merrill Lynch, have advocated for LGBTQ policies in the public (as opposed to just the private, corporate) sphere. This progression, Ball astutely notes, has led to an interesting paradox, wherein LGBTQ progressives find themselves embracing corporate America on these issues but confronting them on others, such as antiunion, antiregulatory, and antitax policies. He delivers both an insightful history and an excellent road map for any group seeking progressive social change.
