As an unconsenting "face of diversity" at a statistics conference, Dan Simpson contemplates the role of his gay identity in his academic life.
Dan Simpson is a statistician. He left Australia for Europe after his PhD in 2009 and is currently an Assistant Professor and the Canadian Research Chair in Spatiotemporal Modelling at the University of Toronto.
This story originally aired on June 21, 2019 in an episode titled “Strength.”
Story Transcript
“Of course we've got diversity. Two of the guys who spoke yesterday were from Quebec.”
It’s a bold piece of rhetorical ground to stake out as a position in a discussion professionally about representation, because I was somewhere in Canada, there were moose, I don’t know where I was, and it was cold. We were drinking cheap red wine and it was a statistics conference, because that’s what I do. And we were having the conversation that everyone is having at the moment, the conversation that, for some reason, when a group of men stand together to select a group of people to speak, they somehow forget that women exist. And that’s bad, quite bad.
And it didn’t help by somebody staking out the ground that some men from Quebec were good enough. So you think, “Okay, we've hit the low point of the conversation. Now, starts the learning.”
Because then the next thing he said was, “And we've got Dan. He's gay.”
And I am 100%. Sweet. Congratulations.
“Also didn’t talk at the conference.” So sort of a side issue and I was annoyed, a little bit annoyed. I didn’t appreciate being used as somebody’s human diversity shield.
So I looked at this guy, put down my coffee mug of wine and hissed, “Just because I suck cock doesn’t mean I’m diverse.”
And it doesn’t. I’m, give or take, the second least diverse person in any room. I’m a cisgendered white man. I've got all the privilege. That I’m gay just makes me slightly less annoying, but only slightly.
So I was angry. But I wasn’t angry about the thing I should have been angry about. And I was standing. Mostly, I was sitting. I was drinking. I don't know what I was doing. I was prone. I was prone by a fire. And I was in a professional context and some middle-aged, straight guy just decided to declare to the room that I was gay, which is not even surprising. It’s not even surprising. It happens constantly. Constantly.
Conferences, dinners, hallways, work events. My last two fucking job interviews, somebody is going to tell me that I’m gay - well, tell me, I already know - tell everybody else that I’m gay. You just get used to it. There's no GDPR up/down straight people. They're fucking obsessed with telling everyone your identity.
And I don't care anymore. I’m very out at work. I could explode into a glitter bomb and I'd blast out of work. But at some point I did care because I remember the first time it happened to me.
I was 20. It was 2005. I had just started my PhD. I’m from Australia. I’m from a small town in Australia. They make aluminum and, apparently, at least one gay, but not anymore. We’re not made out of aluminum. And I was at this conference. It was somewhere not that far, relatively speaking, from where I grew up in a place, a small town that didn’t make aluminum. It made an army base, so another safe space.
And I'd never been to a conference before. I knew nothing. I knew no one. I was a deeply closeted, 20-year-old, Catholic, self-loathing guy. I did what you had to do. I went out and met people. I went to a kegger. We had a kegger because that’s what conferences happen in Australia. They put kegs of beer in wheelie bins and took them to events. This was the tropics. The beer was warm.
But anyway, not the point. Went to this kegger, and it was great fun. Met a bunch of people, it was wonderful. The next morning, I went to lunch, stumbled out of a session, totally not a hangover. 100% totally because I didn’t really drink then because I was a deeply-closeted, gay guy. And you don’t drink when you're deeply closeted because shit leaks out and leakage is the enemy of the closet.
So I went and I sat down and I said hi to people I'd been talking to all night. There were several people I didn’t know there as well and this girl said, “Ah, hi everyone. This is Dan. Dan’s from QUT and he's gay,” and I fucking died. I died. It was the worst-case scenario because it was everything I didn’t want to happen.
And I did what you do. [giggles], except not that because that gives it away. I was cool with it. I made my face look like I hadn’t heard what they were talking about the night before. I made my face look like I couldn’t see them when she told them and their feelings. I sat through that lunch and I smiled and I laughed and I talked about maths, and then I got the fuck out of there. I did my best to never see them again.
That put me back into the closet for so long because I was sure I could never be out at work.
Flash forward to a more recent time. A couple of weeks after the thing with the mousse and the wine and the diversity shield, I was somewhere and there was a phone call. I was invited to join a teleconference because they needed more guys. The thing that’s never ever, ever happened in the whole history of STEM, there's never been a meeting with like, “Shit, we need more guys. Can we find them?”
But this was one of those things because it was a meeting about women. It was a meeting about safety. It was a meeting about problems that had been happening in the community with sexual assault at conferences and trying to work out what we could do about it.
So I said, “Sure, I can spend some time on that. I can spend an evening trying to solve these problems.”
So I signed on. It was at 11:00 at night because I was in Australia and it’s a terrible time zone. I just sat there and we talked and good things happened, very positive things came out of it and then, eventually, it happened. Someone on the line said, “Dan, you're gay. What’s it like being a gay in statistics?”
“A gay.” And I didn’t know what to do because that wasn’t why I was on the phone call. I was on the phone call because I was invited. I wasn’t on the phone call because I was gay. It’s a different part of my identity.
And, more than that, it wasn’t the fucking topic. Misogyny and homophobia are sisters. They're not twins. So, to a large extent, my experience as a gay in statistics was not massively relevant to the conversation we were having.
So I did what I always do when I panic when straight people ask me things. I just said some shit and hoped it would go away. I did and it did and good things happen. And I've been thinking about that since because no one had ever asked. I never really thought about what it was like to put my head down before.
And I don't know how to answer the question because I don’t know how to tell a bunch of people that I’m scared when I meet new statisticians that I don't know how it’s going to go. I don't know how to tell them that I think I’m going to die when I’m waiting for a conference dinner because I’m so nervous. I don’t know how to tell them that I fucking lie and say that I am devastatingly seasick on boats so that I never have to be trapped with my colleagues on a boat, which is an issue that comes up. I don't know how to tell them what it feels like.
When I see some young guy who I know is gay smooth himself out because he's not sure about his company, I don't know how to explain what it feels like when I see somebody seeing me do the same thing. I don't know how to explain that years and years after that last story, years, I finally found, I don't know what, the courage or the boredom or the whatever to finally put some of my identity into the way that I communicate at science. That immediately as I got off the stage a croaking chorus of middle-aged, white men came up to me and told me I was doing it wrong.
I don't know how to explain to somebody that hasn’t fucking done it what it’s like to give an invited talk at a conference and have it go great. Have it go great, and then spend the two hours on the train home, just twice as long as I talked for, having some senior professor tell me how to do it again but straight, like I wasn’t in the closet for 24 years, like I fucking know how to lie.
I don't know how to explain this stuff. I don't know how to explain that I’m the wrong person to ask this question to because, when I was 24 and I finally started coming out, I didn’t come out at work. I’m not an idiot. I had ambition. I pushed down everything that I thought was too faggy. I pushed down my hope. I pushed down my humor. I pushed down my empathy. I pushed down my joy and my love so that I could maybe do my job well.
You know what? That works. Leaning on your other privilege works great. By the time I was 31, I had a job offer as a full professor at a decent university in England. And I got it the bad way, because that hurts. But not me. I was dead inside years before. That hurt other people.
Because do you know what it’s like to stand there and interact with other people, with junior people, with marginal people, with vulnerable people as somebody who is just tamping down all of their humanity so that they can be better at fucking statistics? Do you know what that’s like? I wasn’t a monster. I was an absolute raging dickhead and so many people had to survive interactions with me.
How do I explain what that feels like? I don't know. How do I explain that I actually have a really good answer to the question? I know what it’s like to be a gay in statistics, but I don't want to give it because it’s too clean. It’s too clean for straight people. It’s too pat. It’s too nice. I don't know how to tell them that to be gay in statistics it to not be supposed to be there.
There's a reason we’re constantly being outed and it’s because they're fucking shocked that there's a gay. No one is expecting it. Statistics is a place for middle-aged, straight, white men and people who are willing to pretend to be them. The reason why those professors, those men, would come up to me after I tried to just be myself and tell me how to do it again but straighter is that it didn’t even occur to them that there were more than one experience, more than one way to tell a story, to express yourself, to communicate facts and to communicate science. It never occurred to them.
How do I tell people that? I don't even have any hope left because I know the gatekeepers in my community, I know the next round of gatekeepers in my community, and I know the fucking round after that. And I know that we are not a diverse set of people. I know that these experiences and these opinions are not going to arrive from somewhere. How do I explain, but I just don’t know what to do.