The Only Gay at the Enterprise Dinner

I was at an enterprise dinner, eight of us, private room, the only out gay person at the table. The move I want to write about is the move I see queer operators make and almost nobody talks about in business writing.

I went and hung out with the women

There are versions of these dinners where the men cluster in one corner doing the things men do in business clusters. There are versions where the introvert disappears into their phone for the cocktail hour. There are versions where you try to fight the room and become “the founder guy” with the CMO straight away.

The move that has worked for me, over and over, is to find the women. Find the women, sit down next to them, and ask them what they are working on. The women at these dinners are, almost without exception, the most interesting people in the room. They are senior, they got there on their actual work, and they are not in performance mode about it. They are also, in my experience, the most likely to enjoy talking with the only out gay person at the table, because the only out gay person at the table reads as a peer in a way the third VP of demand generation does not.

This is not a trick. This is not a strategy I deploy. This is the social move I would make at any party. I find my people. The fact that my people in a private dining room of operators tend to be the women in the operator group is just, statistically, how the rooms work. Nobody is going to tell you that in a business book. They should.

What happens after that

The CMO comes over. Every time. The CMO comes over because the most interesting conversation in the room is the one she also wants to be in. The CMO joins the table. We are now four people deep in a real product conversation, because the queer guy and the senior women set the tone, and the tone is “tell me what is actually hard about this.”

I have closed more meaningful business relationships from that pattern than from any cold email I have ever written. The pattern is: do not perform for the senior person. Have the conversation you actually want to have, with the people you actually want to have it with, and let the senior person walk into the part of the dinner that is interesting on its own.

Being queer is a kind of operator training. You learn how to find the people who will not make the room harder for you, and how to be specific instead of generic, because the generic version of you was never available in the first place.

Forty seconds, and a willingness to go sit next to whoever is going to have the most honest conversation. The rest is just dinner.

Cheers.