Bil:

"But how do we do this?"

Well, we can start by turning up the heat on those 'community' organizations with hiring power to stop discriminating in their own hiring practices.

I know - that doesn't address overall numbers of jobs or increasing those numbers, but ending the discrimination in allocation of a community economic resource would be a start.

Patricia:

Thanks for this post.

"How do we do this?" ... One thing we can do is develop better support systems for GLBT entrepreneurism. A few points here:

(1) Although Patricia is correct that "our community doesn’t abound in well-paying corporate jobs with benefits and pensions, because it’s so small-business-based" ... we can still name a few such successes: the software company Quark Express generated millions in profit that eventually funded the Gil Foundation; Andrew Tobias built a financial guru empire, not to mention that he also rose to become Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Several current gay/lesbian millionaires were early employees at Microsoft, back when employees were compensated with generous stock options. ... But these success stories are relatively rare, and more to do with raw talent, hard work, and dumb luck than by any force creditable to the GLBT populace.

But the main point here is this: Once a business grows to a particular size, giving preference to GLBT job applicants constitutes reverse discrimination, and under an ENDA-type law, would be totally and unquestionably illegal --- and *is* illegal under many existing city and state ordinances. So supporting the employment opportunities of GLBT workers (of any age) needs to be done in the same spirit as we support equal opportunity for racial groups --- even when GLBT employers and/or equity owners are at hand.

(2) The above notwithstanding, the GLBT community could do a *much* better job at supporting and encouraging GLBT entrepreneurism. Clearly, being a GLBT businessperson takes a somewhat different set of skills compared to the straight business mainstream. Several major cities have a "Rainbow" Chamber of Commerce through which GLBT-owned and GLBT-friendly businesses can network (we have one here in Indianapolis), but these groups have problems of their own --- let's face it, some of us are natural networkers, and some of us aren't, and the native networkers tend to form an "in-crowd" that a sizable periphery find impenetrable. And networking aside, some of us are simply better businessmen and businesswomen than others. A system that develops business skills no matter where the potential GLBT entrepreneur is starting from would serve our communities better.

(3) A footnote: I have found no area of small-business/work-from-home to be more GLBT-blind and GLBT-unfriendly than multi-level marketing ("MLM") --- in these companies, one usually gets instructed to "tell your prospects about your wife and kids so they can relate to you being just like them" ... totally in denial of the fact that either the rep or the customer or both might be GLBT. This effect, plus the fact that MLM is good at attracting right-wingers who are willing to preach the Bible, heteronormative family values, and MLM all in the same breath, makes us almost totally invisible. I have found that there is no such thing as a GLBT network marketing organization or community, nor have I been successful at gathering a critical mass needed in forming one.

Y'know, this really underscores why trans inclusion in ENDA is so important. As someone who's currently 45, if this bill passes next year without us and the averages hold true, I'll be just a few years short of Social Security age by the time my rights in the workplace are protected.

Before we can hope to have a really effective solution for this problem in place, we have to clean house in DC and make sure the political gameplaying going on with people's lives and livelihoods finally comes to an end.