GenQ - For the not so straight individual

I am currently on the market for a new job; it's something that almost every person has to go through at some stage in their lives. One comment that has been made to me though (on more than once occasion), is to not make it obvious that you're gay in your interview. Without actually sticking a sign on my forehead saying I am gay, it generally takes longer than two seconds for most people to figure out my sexuality. But my question (as I often pose), is why do people have to disguise who we are for certain things?

Personally, I always thought that you were hired for a particular position based on your qualifications, and not primarily due to your sexuality. Why do people still get so judgmental about these issues? It is questions like this, and the frequency that they are raised, that puts the gay rights movement just that one step further away from us.

To those that choose not to reveal their sexuality to colleagues, I admire you to a degree. I have done it myself in a position that I had for nearly four years. My boss and I decided to have a discussion about gay people while there were no customers around. I asked him what he thought about gay people (after the previous customers that I had served were gay); he said he had no problems with gay people, but declared everything that I personally have ever wanted in life to be unnatural right to my face. I am not going to lie about it; it hurt. And he still doesn't know to this day how much it did affect my impressions of him.

Occasionally I have guests stay in my bedroom and lucky me gets stuck with the sofa bed. Each and every time this happens, one of the people I live with often comes up to me and says that I need to put away my Queer Eye and QAF DVDs, as they may not like them being there. This is my room we are talking about here! Why should I have to hide things in my own room? I thought the purpose of coming out of the closet was to let people know of your sexuality, rather than let them know and then hide every single trace of it at a later stage.

Why is it so important to make an impression with a sexuality that ceases to exist? If you want to impress people, you should impress them with your true self, rather than just parts of it. But in a society in which a significant proportion of people do still discriminate, it just seems like we can't do that sometimes. Will we ever be able to on a permanent basis? Let's hope so.