A Boardroom Revolution: It Pays to be Gay

When Angela Mason began her 10-year directorship of the Stonewall gay lobby group in 1992, she had a friend in the corporate world who had two phones in his house. One he used to take personal calls for him and his partner. The other was for the office. When it came to being out and proud in the workplace, few and far between was the employee who would happily step out of the closet and declare: “I’m gay, let’s do business.”

“People used to genuinely fear that they would lose their jobs if they were outed, and many did,” Mason remembers. “If you were found out it was absolutely the end.”

It was with some sense of satisfaction, therefore, that Ms Mason read the news this week that MI5 was finally going to step out of the closet itself and begin openly recruiting people from within the gay community.

One of the last bastions of the British establishment, a place that, until the early 1990s, had actually banned hiring gays because of fears that outed spies could be blackmailed, had finally capitulated and realised that if you want to hire the best talent, you have to look at all sections of society. The days of the Oxbridge don giving white, male graduates a tap on the shoulder and a nod towards Thames House were truly over.

The domestic intelligence service is now not only going to start actively employing openly gay recruits, it is also hiring Stonewall (a group once associated with, and run by, former radicals such as Ms Mason) to advise the security services on how to encourage its spies to be more open about their sexuality and how to persuade more gay applicants to apply for jobs there.

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Latest in Intelligence: MI5 Recruiting Gay Spies

In its latest bid to attract a broader range of applicants to combat the threat of Islamist terrorism since the London bombings three years back, British intelligence service MI5 is to recruit gay spies.

The agency has hired the country’s leading gay group, Stonewall, to help it recruit homosexuals and encourage spies to come out from the closet and open up about their sexuality, according to a senior British government official.

“The service (MI5) seeks to reflect the broad range of the United Kingdom society which it serves,” leading newspaper ‘The Sunday Times’ quoted the unnamed government official at Whitehall as saying.

MI5’s decision to take in gays followed the success of its earlier drive to recruit British Muslims and speakers of Asian languages to fight the war against terror since July 7, 2005’s London bombings.

Until the early 1990s, homosexuals were barred from sensitive government jobs because of fears that they would be vulnerable to blackmail.

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