Challenging Homophobia and Heterosexism: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Issues in Organizational Settings (review)

This short volume presents a number of strategies for changing policy and procedure to be more inclusive of and sensitive to issues faced by nonheterosexual members within organizations. This text could be useful for instructors of courses in human resources and/or organizational change, but its value in other higher education courses would probably be very limited.

Part of the difficulty of wedding the practical and the theoretical in a work such as this is the problem of explaining how language, experience, and epistemology shape understanding, policy, and procedures. In Chapter 1, Robert J. Hill explains and explicates language and terminology about nonheterosexual issues; he does a good job of limning the slippery slopes of identities based in large part on desire. While Hill does an admirable job, a reader less familiar with the contrasting and contested concepts might be overwhelmed by the rush of terms.

The theoretical underpinnings of this volume's chapters are based on Hill's work. His focus is on adult education and development, much of which will be new (but not necessarily unfamiliar) to scholars of nonheterosexual identities in higher education settings. I have not seen much attention in the literature dealing with identity development in the workplace given to nonheterosexual identity. Consequently, I found the chapter on that topic by Kathleen P. King and Susan C. Biro both intriguing and novel. However, the processes and models they present seem more delimiting in terms of identity expression than current nonheterosexual identity development theories and models for postsecondary students. As a result, I am not convinced that King and Biro's concept of employment settings as sites for "transformative learning" is necessarily positive.

The chapters in this volume are divided fairly evenly between postsecondary education and workplace issues. Examples of the former include the chapter by Andre P. Grace and Kristopher Wells, who provide an interesting report on teacher education programs in Canada where nonheterosexual status is both recognized and protected. They, along with Thomas V. Bettinger, Rebecca Timmins, and Elizabeth J. Tisdell (in their chapter on being out in the classroom), examine, albeit not deeply, how to support and encourage the nonnormative (nonheterosexual) individual and perspective while attempting to deemphasize the power of the normative (heterosexual) schooling environment.

The contributors to this volume who do not focus on schooling proper are more practical and less reflective in their approaches. Corey S. Munoz and Kecia M. Thomas contribute a chapter on what human resource directors need to know, again focusing on how nonheterosexual issues play out in nonacademic continuing education. In a chapter on career development, Tonette S. Rocco and Suzanne J. Gallagher try to examine and deconstruct "straight privilege" in employment settings, albeit all too briefly and with few concrete suggestions about career counseling for nonheterosexuals or for those who wish to change such privileged settings.

The chapter by Eunice Ellen Hornsby provides a good overview of the current legal and employment issues that nonheterosexual individuals must confront, along with concise strategies for changing policy statements and regulations accordingly. I am not sure I agree with her premise that policy will drive organizational change. One of the difficulties that other gay activists and I find in placing the responsibility and hope for cultural and social change in "policy work" is that policies work only when groups or classes of people (or situations) are recognized, understood, and participating in the organizations and cultures making the policies.

In time, social change can come from policy strategies, to be sure; but too often on our campuses nonheterosexuals face the hypocrisy of senior faculty and administrators who neither administer through nor encourage change from campus policies on diversity and/or nonheterosexual members of campus. Policy efforts should never be more than one strategy among several (including education, examination, and confrontation) through which social and...