I Was a Diplomat Where Being Gay Was a Crime

Corporate pride looks different from there.

I was a US diplomat in Senegal and Egypt. In both countries, being gay is illegal.

I lived in a bubble. Diplomats mostly spend time with people like us: other diplomats, expats, locals who have lived overseas. Embassy homes and parties become small pieces of the West, where a man can mention a date with another man the way he mentions the weather.

After a few months, one friend told me how much it meant that he could be out with us. No one in his family knew. He lived a double life.

He had trusted me with a secret that could have sent him to prison. As a diplomat, you hold a lot of secrets. I didn't register that this was one of them. Him and I talking about having crushes on the same guys was so ordinary to me.

At a party, another friend wore a strappy leather top. He told me he couldn’t wear it anywhere but here, inside a diplomat’s house party. Here he was safe.

I felt proud to be American.

I live in DC now, and I love Pride. People here roll their eyes at how corporate the parade has become. I tear up. Pride is so uncontroversial that corporations join. No hiding under diplomatic immunities.

A national brand giving out eggplants and bananas isn’t a newsworthy event.

Looking at the foam eggplant that a national grocery chain gave out during Pride Parade, I think of Egypt.

The Egyptian government has spent years hunting any sign of a gay community. It uses “debauchery” laws and frames crackdowns as public order and national security. Police go on apps like Grindr to find people.

Some of the companies with floats at DC Pride are major employers in Egypt, Senegal, and other countries where being gay is illegal.

Often, these companies do “covert allyship” they don’t advertise without putting their workers at risk.

Nearly 1,500 of the world’s largest multinationals sign the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which bars discrimination against gay employees everywhere they operate.¹ A company cannot protect an employee from his government, but it can protect him from itself. LGBTQ applicants in hostile countries seek out firms that are known to be open.

Other acts of rebellion or support are private. After Singapore barred foreign firms from funding the local Pride festival, Dow held its own version inside the office. At Microsoft India, workers were invited to join an anonymous LGBTQ inclusion Skype call.

Some firms run ally networks. An Ernst Young subdivision in India saw 4,000 of its 21,000 employees join. In hostile places, allyship also benefits LGBT employees directly - those who want to stay closeted can be allies. They can take part now and come out later if they ever feel safe.

These companies won’t usually lobby governments. But they are a steady source of these values in places that allow almost none. Governments can’t fully shut it out because governments want what these companies bring: headquarters, shipping hubs, international flight routes, investment, jobs, prestige.

When a global brand turns its logo rainbow for a month, that image reaches places that ban the flag itself. Egypt jailed and tortured a young woman for waiving one at a concert.

The rainbow is powerful. Some hires in less-friendly Hong Kong said they joined a global company because the interviewer wore a rainbow pin.

When I see those corporate floats at DC Pride, I think about where those brands travel. A corporation participating in Pride has no excuse not to back its people abroad. They’re more likely to support employee’s running programs in ways tuned to what a place will allow: a Diversity 101 course in China that explains the definition of bisexual or what human rights are.

Corporate Pride is often just marketing, but the audience is bigger than us. Many watch from the shadows. Too much of the world lives like my friends, only holding hands in safe living rooms on certain evenings.

The rainbow logo and corporate-sponsored celebrations tell them that their hostile government is in the wrong.

The nondiscrimination policies we asked for here travel across borders. The conviction behind them does not have to run deep to reach far.

1. 97% of ranked multinational corporations provide these protections in every country they operate in. Notably, fewer companies with federal contracts participated in 2026.