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18 Emp. Resp. & Rts. J. 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/emprrj18 and id is 1 raw text is: Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2006 (© 2006) DOI: 10.1007/s10672-005-9000-9 Introduction to Special Issue Editor's Introduction - Special Issue on Sexual Orientation/Identity Issues in the Workplace Published online: 23 April 2006 What a difference a decade makes!! I just finished perusing the program for the Academy of Management Annual Meeting for 1996. There was virtually nothing on the program that dealt with sexual orientation/identity issues in the workplace. At that point not only were sexual orientation issues not on the radar screen of most Academy members and/or seen as important to study, but management academicians who did choose to do research in this area were generally assuming significant risks. One colleague of mine, who had just completed his PhD at that time and wanted to do research in this area, was strongly discouraged from doing so by his dissertation committee chair and other mentors. He was told that such research was not mainstream or valued and that doing such research early in his career, without the protection of tenure, was unquestionably career suicide. At that time, those interested in doing research on sexual orientation/identity issues were largely confined to the Women In Management (WIM) interest group. Slowly, within this group a strong support network was formed. Each year a greater number of individuals tested the waters by submitting and presenting their work on sexual orientation at the Academy. Shortly thereafter WIM changed its name to Gender and Diversity in Organizations (GDO) and became a full-fledged division. Not only were the numbers of submission increasing but the quality of research being undertaken related to sexual orientation/identity began to be noticed. Three years ago the unthinkable happened; a paper whose research was focused on gay bathhouses won a Best Paper Award at the Academy of Management Conference. The even bigger shock was that it was awarded in the Organization and Management Theory Division. The authors, Bryant Hudson and Gerardo Okhuysen, dual-handedly pushed the frontiers of sexual orientation research forward with their creative, high-quality and very risky research. In a recent conversation, I told Bryant that this work and its recognition are going to be regarded as a critical turning point in the demarginilization of sexual orientation/identity research within the academic management circles. By 2005, the program of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting contained a very wide range of sessions devoted to sexual orientation/identity issues; either grouped together on their own or fully integrated within the other more traditional research domains. Upon seeing the program and also hearing that Group and Organization Management, on whose Editorial Board I have served for a number of years, was planning on doing a special issue on sexual orientation/identity issues in the workplace, I prepared a call for papers to 1 0892-7545/06/0300-0001/0 © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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